Explanations of the elements

"We want to understand community needs". They emerge from the community's inherent elements and processes, instead of consensus or voted opinions of individual members' desires.

Concept designers. Designers are here thought to be early stage strategic or concept designers.

The user community, which is realised or imagined, is divided into everchanging sub-worlds and has fuzzy borders, and is seen through eyeglasses having double lenses.

Principally reciprocal refers to the possibility that reciprocity does not always exist, not to mention the rest of the positive feelings listed. However, they are common goals and even a hope that they would exist is enough for members in many cases.

The social world perspective gives a larger frame, explaining the main social setting in question. The lense of the mobile context of use are then more detailled, dealing with contextual attributes within the settings of social worlds and their sub-worlds. This lense gives a picture of situated action.

Analysing the setting(s) and context(s) inside of them we can distill the segments of the inherent community needs, such as the need of discuss about authenticity questions.

The concept developers and builders co-realize the working functionality together with the community members. Detailed analysis process

1. Select a current or imagined future social setting
   • Start by discussing and defining the primary activity.
2. Choose appropriate Social World Frame
   • In our experience, the most clearcut ones are technology, site and organisational dynamics. However, restricting the analysis to those frames only will just give a part of the picture. Fashion is often fun to consider.
3. Choose appropriate Mobile Context attributes
4. "Distill" community needs
   • If you skipped it previously, have a look at the last section about community needs in the Introduction
   • have a look at the social design strategies
   • write your own community needs, in an appropriate format (e.g. oneliners, brief paragraphs, scenarios, high-level use cases, etc.)

Remember two things. First, the more you read about the model, the easier it will be to understand the community needs. Second, you probably need to do the discussion / analysis in a group, it's rare that any individual has all the knowledge required.