A framework for analyzing and understanding online communities

Abstract

Social interactions in online communities are varied and often complex, as are the communities themselves. The characteristics of the people, the range of purposes they pursue, the type of governance policies they develop, and the design of the software supporting a community, vary from community to community. These characteristics determine a community's sociability. Thus, the availability of powerful analytic tools to help designers understand existing technology-supported social activity online can broaden the spectrum of design knowledge and promote new insights for designing computer applications of this sort. In this paper, we present one such analytic tool—a theoretically-based online community framework (OCF). In order to demonstrate the efficacy of the framework we elaborate on its communication constituent using semiotic theory to help us. This constituent is particularly important in the OCF because it addresses computer-mediated communication between community members, and also communication from interactive software designers to users via the software they design. This latter kind of communication can shape the community's experience to a considerable extent, as our analysis shows. The paper ends with an agenda for future research.