Then she got with the Web program. As she worked to develop the Players Club, Typaldos thought more and more about how online communities evolve and about what it takes for them to thrive. Her research base broadened from the tens of thousands of postings that she studied on GolfWeb to the work of sociologists like Marc Smith, now the resident sociologist at Microsoft. In November 1997, she and Mark Waters, who was then an executive at GolfWeb, founded RealCommunities, a company that designs and builds infrastructure and services for other Web communities. Here, in an interview with Fast Company, Typaldos discusses the ideas and design principles that define real communities.
Communities form around a shared purpose.
They're made up of people who come together to do something that they couldn't do alone. Think about a PTA, or a neighborhood association, or a Web-based meeting for systems administrators. If you don't provide people with a compelling reason to come together, and if you don't give them the means to accomplish that shared sense of purpose, then your community will fail. Now, there's a big difference between people who have a shared purpose and people who merely have something in common. You can't build a community around people who own white cars, for example.