Virtual Communities and Synchronicity
How a community works,
and what the technology owes its members.
What is a virtual community?
Shaffer and Anundsen define a community as a group that shares common practices. Its members depend on one another. They make decisions together. They see themselves as part of something larger. And they commit, long term, to the well-being of the group.
The original opens with an epigraph from M. Scott Peck.
Social glue
A community needs a goal that serves the whole group. Members need to control their own privacy, and feel safe doing it. Each member must be accountable for what they say and do.
Your influence and usefulness matter more than your real-life identity. Change your identity and you give up the credibility you built.
Uniqueness
Each member should be distinct, with a recognized place in the group. Uniqueness creates value. Letting members exchange digital assets supports growth. Secure identification of members is the key.
Technology: the digital canvas
The organizer supplies the technology. Members use it to express who they are. Control over privacy is what holds the community together.
The tools include:
- chat and messaging
- events
- exchange systems
- collaboration tools
The next evolution of online services
Members become the creators. The platform becomes the indexer. Its job is to organize, index and distribute what members make. It narrowcasts to the people who want it. It does not broadcast to everyone.
The Tao of online communities
Virtual communities are about aggregating people.From Net Gain, 1997
Seed the community. Feed the interaction quickly. Weed what does not work. Do not fix the design in advance. Adjust it as you learn.
How a virtual community works
A community is a cluster of niche groups. A few people lead. Many watch. Some take part. Founding members set the tone, so give them special privileges. Organizers set rules of conduct and the consequences of breaking them. Within that structure, members discover their own beliefs and sub-communities.
Starting one
Gather a critical mass of founders first. Their example does more than any rulebook.
Moderating
Moderators scale with the size of the membership. Leadership is earned. It is never handed out for free.
Defining elements and key ingredients
The original names the defining elements and the three key ingredients. They include focus, content integration, member content, tools, opportunity and value.
Earthgrid.net, and the synchronicity factor
In the late 1990s I wrote a template-based markup language called GDML. It let website owners add live member-to-member interaction. By my reckoning, the design came more than five years before the big social platforms. My hope was that organizations would use it to talk to their own members.
The synchronicity factor is the idea behind it. Technology should cut noise and correct itself, so the right people find each other.
Updates
2012
The original Perl software from the 1990s still ran. We used it mainly for marketing, networking and SEO. Parts were rewritten in PHP. Mobile became the focus.
2015
People were used to search-engine organization. Facebook, photos and video took over. Mass-produced duplicate content breaks the uniqueness principle. It also drives information overload. Bridge technologies such as Earthgrid Search and Search Triggers organize listings for websites.
2021
AI learning systems profile you from your past behavior. I proposed a different path: probability, randomness, evolutionary algorithms and popularity indexes. We grew sideways through integrations, such as one-click registration and a webinar follow-up system. The future of virtual communities is the fight for attention.
Where this went
The network you are on now is the 2026 answer to that question. Read the story behind it, or the eight principles it runs on.