In my head right now, the most important defining characteristics of a community are:
- a recognizable identity
- a boundary of some sort differentiating what is inside from what is outside
- some means of authority over that boundary, encompassing both what is allowed to go in as well as what is allowed to come out
- usually some internal boundaries that can divide things inside the community into sub-groups
So, trying to keep things from a more user-facing perspective.
A Recognizable Identity
The community should have a web handle, just like Atmosphere user accounts, so that I can mention / find it in any app if I know it’s handle.
I think usually a community shoud have its handle be a visitable website, too, so that I instantly know where to go to get more info about that community.
For example for Muni Town we have a @muni.town Atmosphere account, and we have a ( work-in-progress ) https://muni.town site made with Blento.
The community should also have a standardized “profile” of sorts so that:
- Public communities can be discovered by indexing the network.
- I can search for communities that I might be interested in based on their descriptions, tags, location or similar elements.
- All my apps know how to show me the basic info about any given community that I’m allowed to see.
Clear Boundaries
Similar to knowing that a post is by a specific user, I need to be able to know when some content is in a community.
This doesn’t always mean authored by the community, but it does mean, at the very least, included in the community somehow.
Again, this is similar to a user account. A re-post doesn’t represent something the user wrote, but I know that the user decided to reference that content under their own account.
This also applies to subgroups in the community. It can make a big difference to me whether a post is included in the “team members” subgroup compared to in the “public forum” subgroup.
Any content that I see in a community or one of its subgroups is there because the community or subgroup allowed it to be there.
A Means of Authority
The community boundaries are meaningful because they have some authority behind them, similar to a user’s posts carrying authority because they wrote ( or at lest authorized someone else to write ) under their own identity.
Different communities may have totally different authority mechanism. Some communities may have one person who decides with absolute power what is included in the community. Others may have some democratic process or have delegated owners for particular subgroups, etc.
As a user, there are a lot of times I actually don’t need to care about the details of the way authority is managed for a community. It may be enough for me to merely see or contribute within the communities and subgroups that I have access to.
The most common interaction a user will probably have with the authority will be to join a community or subgroup.
It would be best if there was some standardized way to go about joining a community / group, or at least finding out where to go to do so. That way, if I find an interesting community through some community-disocovery app, the discovery app will know how to help me join, or send me to a place where I can apply to join.
Community Managers
The people who create or manage communities will have to be much more involved with the means of authority. They will need to be able to create a community, possibly set up roles and add members with different levels of access, configure who is allowed to join, whether the community is public or private, etc.
The levels of complication here can anywhere from very simple to extremely complex.
Different community management apps should be allowed to exist so that they each may give community managers different kinds of abilities as far as creating and delegating access to the community and its subgroups.
Regardless of the community management app that is being used, all of the other non-management apps should still be able to recognize the community and its boundaries, even if it has no knowledge of the nuances involved in the means of authority.