---
# System prepended metadata

title: 'Conceptual Framework: Community'

---

<aside>
🎯 About this document:
Here we aim to define the conceptual foundations we use to explore Community Health and Community Health Analytics.
This document will be made available for feedback by those interested in the initiative and will eventually be published.

Specifically, **we seek to answer the following questions:**

1. What do we mean by Community? How do we define it?
2. What types of Community are there and are DAO Communities a new type? (i.e. what parallels can we draw and what previous research can we leverage)
    1. How do we accommodate the different potential segments of community - contributors, token holders, participants in social channels (Perhaps the question is already embedded in the thinking proposed) (Ashish) 
3. What is DAO Community Health?
    1. Hypothesis on the impact Community Health can create for the DAO, and therefore the potential benefit of improving it
    - What can we borrow from previous work on Community Health (given the above)?
    - What other perspectives are needed?
4. What promotes and hampers DAO Community Health?
5. How can we think about measuring DAO Community Health?

For discussion: To start with should we focus on Product and Service DAOs ? Oher forms such as social, investment, etc are perhaps smaller and can be looked at a later stage (Ashish) 

</aside>

# Conceptual Framework: Community 

## Literature to process

[Community Principles & Ideals](https://www.notion.so/Community-Principles-Ideals-af595ac8dd1244618973b6ff5dae9809)

# Draft:

## Introduction & Questions

Community is a popular word in DAOs, a meme, an aspiration, and a fundamental part of DAOs.
As we research Community Health, we plunge into this concept exploring the following questions:

1. What do we mean by Community? How do we define it?
2. What types of Community are there and are DAO Communities a new type? (i.e. what parallels can we draw and what previous research can we leverage)
3. What is DAO Community Health?
    - What can we borrow from previous work on Community Health?
    - What other perspectives are needed?
4. What promotes and hampers DAO Community Health? How can the health of a DAO community change?
5. How can we think about measuring DAO Community Health?

# Q1: What do we mean by Community? How do we define it?

Community has been explored across multiple disciplines and perspectives, from biology to marketing, social psychology, network science and beyond.

For example, community is described as following:
- specialized, non-geographically bound community based on structural set of social relations among crowdsourcees for a company. A community has common values, norms, rules and regulations (Chung, Kim, and Shin, 2020)
- is a group of people who are connected through relationships and have a shared identity, and set of values ([Ospina, 2017](https://medium.com/conductal/the-difference-between-communities-groups-and-networks-179ac2052f25))
- composed of: membership, influence, reinforcement and shared emotional connection. (Martiskainen, 2016)
- a self-organized group of people who make a commitment to be there for each other; they participate not only for their own needs, but to serve the needs of others ([Wheatley & Frieze, 2006](https://www.margaretwheatley.com/articles/emergence.html))
-  community as *[Gemeinschaft](https://www.thoughtco.com/gemeinschaft-3026337)* (Ferdinand Tönner 1957 [1887]), where personal and informal ties are common and interaction is influenced by social values.
- need a definition from Wegner or Paul Duguid
- a network science definition as a tight cluster in a network of relationships ([Hu et al 2008](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18850911/))


Common among these definitions is that a community is composed of *people*, and that these people develop *social relations* among each other. A consequence of these two features is that people within one community develop a shared sense of identity strengthen through common values, and (deep) emotional investment for each other and the community.

Ultimately, community members develop a Sense of Community (SoC): "a feeling that members have of belonging, a feeling that members matter to one another and to the group, and a shared faith that members' needs will be met through their commitment to be together.” [McMillan & Chavis (1986)](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/1520-6629(198601)14:1%3C6::AID-JCOP2290140103%3E3.0.CO;2-I). 

<aside>
💡 **A definition of DAO Community**

    We define a DAO community as a group of people who joined a DAO, are interacting with other DAO members or the output of the DAO, and are interested in the activities and outputs of the DAO.
    
    The level of participation will vary between community members, depending on their interests in and (time or financial) commmitment to the DAO. 
 
</aside>

## How can you recognize a community and distinguish between communities

- talk here about sense of community

elaborate on the definition ? like in a checklist type format. A community should have X, Y, Z. A good definition should provide a seamless link to measuring it (ie the definitin can easily be operationalized)

# Q2: What types of Community are there and are DAO Communities a new type? (i.e. what parallels can we draw and what previous research can we leverage)

## Type of (virtual) Communities

The early literature on Community emphasised the importance of shared geography but, with the advent of the internet and social media, non-geographical communities have multiplied and so has the research on them.

The research has distinguished between Offline Communities and Virtual Communities (VCs), and generated conceptual tools that build upon earlier research (including work on Sense of Community for offline communities).

One differentiating factor between offline and virtual communities is the communication medium between members. Offline communities benefit from the richness of offline interaction (e.g., non-verbal communication, touch, smell, hand-signals) and visual membership signals (e.g., clothes, accessories, murals). To add richness and texture to interacton, virtual communities have to develop new ways to substitute the dry text-based communication mediums. Currently this is achieved through emojis, memes, gifs, videos. 

Henri and Pudelko (2003) suggest that communities differ in terms of their *intentionality of gathering*. This refers to the existence of common objectives and interdependence among the participants (Bock, Ahuja, Suh, & Yap, 2015; Gangi & Wasko, 2009; Meirinhos & Oso ́rio, 2009). The more intentional people are with why they are forming a community, the stronger the community will be. 




<!-- do we need this section? I can't make it fit 
### Two dimensions to characterize virtual communities


Henri and Pudelko (2003) virtual community framework was initially developed to conceptualize the level of social learning occuring within communities. They argued that depending on the intentionality and goal-directness of a community, 
According to Henri and Pudelko (2003) virtual communities exist over two dimensions that vary on a continuum:

- The strength of the social bonds: The Sense of Virtual Community which affects the way interactions take place in the community (e.g., interactions in small subgroups or collective action; reactive vs. proactive participation).
- The intentionality of the gathering:
Both dimensions support the other, which leads us to the following typology:


![Typologies of Communitis](https://i.imgur.com/eckg34w.png)
-->

<!-- leave out?
**Other conceptions:** 

“the activity of virtual communities’ participants is sometimes described in terms of formal or informal learning (Trentin, 2001), sometimes in terms of socialization or professional identity development (Gordin, Gomez, Pea & Fishman, 1996) or yet, learning is regarded as a by-product of activity (Nichani & Hung, 2002)" Henri and Pudelko (2003) -->

## Success of Virtual Communities

One can broadly categorize existing research on VCs’ sustainability into two independent streams (Appendix A explains more fully). The first stream examines individual dynamics in VCs and focuses mainly on identifying the factors that influence individuals’ ongoing participation in and contribution to them (e.g., Teo, Chan, Wei, & Zhang, 2003; Lin, 2008; Chung & Lee, 2009; Hsiao & Chiou, 2012). The second stream focuses primarily on VCs’ structural dynamics and investigates how their network characteristics evolve over time (e.g., Butler, 2001; Buriol, Castillo, Donato, Leonardi, & Millozzi, 2006; Otto & Simon, 2008; Panzarasa, Opsahl, & Carley, 2009; Faraj, Jarvenpaa, & Majchrzak, 2011; Wang et al., 2013). [https://aisel.aisnet.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1711&context=jais](https://aisel.aisnet.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1711&context=jais)

![Screenshot 2022-06-09 at 18.47.50.png](https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/edd355c7-0e1e-452c-b6ac-93f324a74243/Screenshot_2022-06-09_at_18.47.50.png)

![Screenshot 2022-06-09 at 18.48.43.png](https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/414b0eb0-a339-40c7-b89e-37addbad3fd9/Screenshot_2022-06-09_at_18.48.43.png)

the success of VCs rests on a participative scheme: Their members’ contributions are necessary for their long-term viability (Bateman, Gray, & Butler, 2011; Bhat-tacherjee, 2001; Bhattacherjee & Lin, 2015)

**Intention to continue** is one of the key variables in understanding the sustainability and success of VCs because it is a driver of behavior and has become an emerging area in academic research (Bhattacherjee & Lin, 2015; Luo et al., 2019; Nabavi Taghavi-Fard, Hanafizadeh, & Taghva, 2016).

![Screenshot 2022-06-09 at 18.39.16.png](https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/59dc4208-28d2-4da1-9239-121a3dade257/Screenshot_2022-06-09_at_18.39.16.png)

SoVC is one of the main elements that fosters participation in VCs (Blanchard & Markus, 2004; Blanchard, 2008; Chen, Yang, & Tang, 2013; Luo, Zhang, & Qi, 2017). Members of a VC will continue to participate to the extent that they feel part of the community, building an online identity and establishing emotional bonds with the rest of the participants (Abfalter, Zaglia, & Mueller, 2012; Luo et al., 2017).

However, a lack of social ties and personal information can mean that this identity does not develop in the same way in a virtual context and, thus, is still fragile (social identity model of deindividuation effects [SIDE]; Reicher, Spears, & Postmes, 1995; Spears, Lea, & Lee, 1990). In this regard, users are required to make an additional effort in order to reinforce and consolidate SoVC and facilitate the collective behavior and sustainability of the VC.

**Role of Size**

On the one hand, large VCs are considered beneficial for active members in that they can share more information resources and provide more social support compared with small VCs (Asvanund, Clay, & Krishnan, 2004; Butler, 2001). Additional resources encourage active members to continue contributing to a VC (Wang et al., 2013). On the other hand, large VCs tend to struggle in maintaining active membership because an increase in network size increases information overload, causes social loafing problems (Kraut, 2003), and weakens the bond among VC members (Hsiao & Chiou, 2012). Large VCs also incur greater costs in terms of moderating the communities and maintaining the quality of posts and the depth of interactions (Gu, Konana, Rajagopalan, & Cheh, 2007). This problem, in turn, diminishes a VC’s overall value to its active members (Jones, Ravid, & Rafaeli, 2004; Ridings, Gefen, & Arinze, 2002; Ridings & Wasko, 2010).

### Types/levels of participation in a community

- figure taken from [discord](https://discord.com/channels/915914985140531240/986011564232552528/986163185063165982)

![Levels of Participation](https://i.imgur.com/Kh9pvd4.png)



# Q3: What is DAO Community Health?
# Q4: What promotes and hampers DAO Community Health? How can the health of a DAO community change?
# Q5: How can we think about measuring DAO Community Health?
## Strategies for Community

**Cliques**

A clique is a subset of a network in which actors are more closely and intensely tied to one
another than they are to the other members of the entire network (Scott, 2000)

Clique formation has been regarded as an emergent individual strategy for coping with the negative effects of an increase in network size (Ganley & Lampe, 2009; Ridings & Wasko, 2010; Hsiao & Chiou, 2012).

## Insights from Community Facilitator Workshop

- main points

## Role of a community manager/facilitator

The role of a community manager is to *cultivate an active and meaningfully engaged community*. More concretely this means:

- Eliminating barriers and friction for people to be able to contribute
    
    *Onboarding:* New members need to have access to the right information to know where and how they can contribute to the community. This information is tangible (e.g., open tasks and processes) and intangible (e.g., mission and values of the community). 
    
    *Offboarding:* CM should make sure than when contributors leave or are absent for some time, that whatever knowledge they have is not lost but documented or in some other way still accessible to the community. 
    
- Coordinate people and activities
    
    CM need to coordinate people’s activities, expectations, and behaviors. They need to ensure that:
    
    - people have access to relevant information
    - information is shared between subgroups
    - Subgroups are aligned with the community’s mission
    - Tension between subgroups and between subgroups and the community’s mission are identified and resolved/worked through
    - Everyone’s behavior in every subgroup is aligned with the community’s mission
    
    To achieve this, CM need to have an excellent overview of the projects running within the community, contributors’ skills and learning aspirations. These tasks are helped with good documentation. 
    
    Successful coordination leads to a self-sustainable community and people working towards a shared mission. 
    
    Specific examples of coordination tasks:
    
    - setting meeting agendas and facilitating meetings
    - making sure meetings are not overlapping
    - sharing meeting notes
    - connecting people
    - sharing resources with specific people
    - collecting feedback about what works and what doesn’t
    - answering questions
    - Synthesising information to make it easier for others to digest and discover relevant information
    - Translate information between people and subgroups to highlight the relevance of the information (avoiding the common Not-Invented-Here web2 problem)
    
- Maintain the community’s values
    
    A less well defined task of a CM is to maintain the community’s values. This is often done through observing people’s behavior and actions and calling out things that are not ok. It is also done through embodying the community’s values and living them. This task is embedded in all the work of a CM. 
    
- Inclusivity & Belonging
    
    CM are tasked with creating an inclusive community where people feel they belong. This does not mean that everyone has to be included, but that people who feel aligned with the community’s mission are included and feel that they belong in this community. Hence, a community’s mission sets the frame for how many voices and what type of voices are present. 
    
    Two ways to create beloging are through:
    
    1. valuing people’s contribution through financial and non-financial reward mechanism. These compensation mechanism need to be perceived to be fair by the community and transparent. 
    2. Listen to the needs of community members, paying close attention to areas of synergies and tension and working with these areas.  
- Partnership and outreach
    
    Finally, CMs are also tasked with creating partnership and outreach activities to increase the community’s visibility within the larger ecosystem.
    

# Bibliography

Di Gangi, Paul M. and Wasko, Molly, " The Co-Creation of Value: Exploring User Engagement in User-Generated Content Websites"
(2009). All Sprouts Content. 303.
[http://aisel.aisnet.org/sprouts_all/303](http://aisel.aisnet.org/sprouts_all/303)

# Discarded

- Sense of Community is composed of four elements:
    - **Membership** (including emotional safety, a sense of belonging and identification, a common symbol system, etc).
    - **Integration and fulfillment of needs** (members feel rewarded for their participation).
    - **Bidirectional Influence** (members can influence the group and the group influences the members).
    - **Shared emotional connection** (including shared history and shared participation and identification with that history, and a deeply felt connection between members).
    

<aside>
💡 **Types of Virtual Communities**

Henri and Pudelko (2003) distinguish 4 types of communities depending on the cohesiveness of the group and the level of intentionality.

![Screenshot 2022-06-09 at 12.56.06.png](https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/0583a10d-0449-4155-b1d8-833913b6a3cb/Screenshot_2022-06-09_at_12.56.06.png)

- **community of interest**: community of interest is a gathering of people assembled around a topic.  Its  members  take  part  in  the  community  to  exchange information, to obtain answers to personal questions  or problems, to improve their understanding of a subject, to share common passions or to play. 
Their synergy cannot be assimilated to that of a formal group motivated by the will to 
collaborate in order to attain a common goal. The members of this type of community identify themselves more to the topic of interest of the group than to its members. Since  the  activity is not directed towards the realization of collective productions nor towards a collective use of common artefacts, the learning is more personal than collective.
- **goal-oriented community of interest:** This form of community is not randomly constituted and compares to  a task-force group or to a project team vested with a specific mandate (Fischer, 2001). It is constituted of "expert" individuals, recruited for their competence or their  experience,  who  will  share and  put  in common  the  knowledge and the approaches related to their respective spheres of specialty or intervention. This type  of  community  is  created  to  meet  specific  needs,  to  solve  a  particular problem, to define or carry out a project. Their lifespan is fixed and linked to a given mandate.
- **learners' community:** A learners’ community is made of students who may be in the same class, the  same institution or dispersed. The  creation of this type of 
community is first function of the intention of an educator who wishes to induce in 
their students a learning process based on action, finalized according to projects 
scaffolding on collaboration between learners. Like communities of interest and goal-oriented communities of interest, learners' communities are time bound.
- **community of practice:** professionals who discuss topics related to their jobs or fields of knowledge

- **Communities of interest** are VCs of ;
- **virtual learning communities** are VCs of students focused on an academic topic;
- **virtual communities of practice** (VCoP) are VCs addressed to .
</aside>

Henri and Pudelko (2003):

“In virtual space, the emergence of a community necessarily takes a formal 
character and is inscribed in a process of rising awareness of its existence or of 
its  potentiality  of  existence.  This  rising  of  awareness  is  concretized  by  the 
declaration of the intention of existence of the community (and eventually by the 
definition of a goal) which is formalized by consigning the list of its members, by 
choosing  tools of  communication, by building  an environment offering  various types of resources (information Web site, databases, collective management and 
production tools, voting devices, etc.) and by adopting rules of operation. Thus, 
the  existence  of  a  community  establishes  itself  during  the  social  process  of 
appropriation of the technological resources which support its activity.”