Purpose and intended readers

Designers, developers and managers involved in developing software to support computer-mediated communities face a significant challenge. The number of people involved in the online interactions is much greater than before, which leads to qualitatively new phenomena that need to be taken into account. Failing to understand the social dynamics creating community needs will result in new technology that inhibit the essential online interactions. Understanding community is like understanding the customer or the user – essential to successful projects and keeping development costs low.

Our intent is to present a community model dealing with computer-mediated communities that will help all stakeholders involved to understand the social background behind the online interactions. For this reason the model has a strong sociological flavour. The main sociological thinking behind the model comes from a certain type of community theory called social world perspectives by Anselm Strauss (1978, 1993). For the hasty readers, as a facade of the whole model could be seen a rather strong conversion of the theory, a conversion that we call Social Design Strategies.