Yesterday Danyel Fisher came to our Seattle office to talk to WJ staff about his work at Microsoft Research and the Community Networking Group. First, he showed us some really pretty pictures of graphical representations of different types of online communities. Looking at the pictures immediately made me want to create one of our own (Janet the evaluation superhero is all over it) but it also made me want to try and guess what the picture would look like, just for fun.The thing is, Q&A communities look one way, with people who answer lots of questions showing up most of the time and posting a lot, but to threads with only one or two replies. More socially oriented communities show an abundance of replies to threads, and more people showing up more often. Put up an X axis that shows number of replies to a thread and a Y axis that shows the number of times people show up in a year and make each individual weighted by their number of posts and you begin to see what I mean: things look pretty different from one community to the next. (Geez, I hope I’m remembering all this right…)

Seems to me that WJ message boards have a lot of the Q&A type activity and a lot of the social activity going on at the same time. I would love to learn exactly how much we have of each. Perhaps that could help us speculate on (1) better technologies (2) better organization (3) better member support & programming. Also, I wonder if there’s a way to effectively create bridges from one type of discourse to the next. There I go, gettin’ all crazy with my online community ideas again. Seriously, I love remembering that there are folks outside of library-land who are thinking (really hard) about this stuff so that we can make use of it out here in practical application land.

Thanks again Danyel for joining us!