The Problem

“Communities” seems to be the buzzword of the year as we see more and more “social networks” and large scale online communities begin to dominate the marketplace. We’ve watched as Facebook went from local university community, to national college-based community, to world-wide software giant-in-the-making, but who is really benefiting from these communities?

Isn’t it the point of a community that with each new participant the power of the community as a whole grows? Why does it seem more and more that the only one’s benefiting from the growth of these communities are the business people reaping the ad-revenue behind them? It’s because that is exactly what is happening. The online web communities we have come to know and love are becoming less and less useful to us and more and more useful to the people who run them.

When Bigger isn’t Better

We need to move away from our infatuation with these over-inflated communities and towards a respect for smaller more specialized communities. When your talking about large scale communities like Facebook, the potential benefits for local communities are dwarfed.  How much do you actually care about Facebook when your using it? I bet you barely even give it a second’s thought, you’re just looking to see what you’re friends have been up to. We as web developers need to begin developing communities for smaller localized groups that actually care about the community as a whole.

If we begin to develop smaller communities with a larger focus on physical presence we can develop communities of people who actually care about the group as a whole and actually want to put forth effort to improve it. (I’m avoiding examples here on purpose, I want you the reader to apply these thoughts as you see fit but I have presented many examples in past blog posts).

We’ve seen this trend many times before. Take corporate America for example: Big companies are full of people who work for money and care/know little about the larger entity they are a part of, while small companies are full of people who work passionately day and night for the growth of the company itself. Our obsession with big in the past few centuries has left us with less and less people who actually care about what they are apart of.

Large communities in turn are not able to offer the sort of specialization or quality of service that a more direct and localized community can offer. There is still an important role these large communities will play in our future, however, it will be the large communities that are built on a network of smaller more specialized and localized communities that prosper. Facebook’s social cause and donation applications have shown us how the massive size of a community can be harnessed for powerful positive influence on our society, but without the smaller focus of localized communities the larger community is nothing but bloated hype.

A system that could properly integrate smaller communities with one another to develop larger more powerful communities could be one of the most influential pieces in the puzzle we call our future.