Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Second Edition

Architecting an Online Community

Online communities aren’t built upon compulsory participation; to succeed, they must attract members who are already busy doing other things. And sometimes online communities compete with other communities that are doing much the same thing.

evolt.org, for example, is focused on web development. As you might guess, there are many other communities that share the same focus. So the evolt.org folks must be doing something right—in three years’ time, they’ve built four active mailing lists, the largest of which (“thelist”) has over 3,000 members. And the evolt.org web site has over 6,000 registered users. These growing numbers are impressive, even more so when you consider evolt.org’s budget, which is roughly US$0. Volunteers contribute their time and passion, and they’ve cobbled together a few servers to make this work.

Obviously, passion and today’s incredibly cheap and powerful information technologies are a potent combination. But they aren’t enough to guarantee success; an environment has to be created to tie them together. Someone has to play God, setting up the rules and structure that create an environment that becomes self-sustaining, where people join in and participate. And that’s where information architecture comes in. Information architecture provides much of the structure that ties together the people, passion, content, and technology into one cohesive place.

So how exactly does information architecture figure into evolt.org?