Online Communities: Designing Usability and Supporting Sociability
If the phrase "planned community" makes you think of terrible homogenous  suburbs, take another look at the Internet. Although there are unplanned aspects  and emergent behaviors, every detail for the most part has been designed by  people who thought that they knew what they were doing. Might we do better?  Human-computer interactions expert Jenny Preece takes apart our preconceptions  and suggests new ways to improve our virtual realities inOnline Communities:  Designing Usability and Supporting Sociability. Part sociological review,  part design manual, the book is dry enough to appeal to techies and academics,  but humanistic enough to touch the organizers and activists who will put her  ideas further into action. Beginning with basic concepts of community and online  activities, Preece moves on to survey research on the use of virtual spaces, and  then focuses on techniques to design and build optimal cybervillages for given  needs and people. By using plenty of examples and case studies from actual Web  sites and other electronic communities, she sheds light on tools that work to  make them sustainable. Whether the current generation of e-planners will heed  her words--and whether they can create something livable out of the weird  suburb/wilderness hybrid that we have now--will be the key to determining how  21st-century humans live, work, and communicate.--Rob Lightner