This course is focused on developing the skills and knowledge on how to design, create, and maintain online communities. Such communities have rapidly become a regular part of a web site in corporate and non-corporate environments. However, there is a persistent notion that communities are completely self-guiding and self-managing. Yes, online communities like their real-world counterparts can evolve to become a self-managing entity, but it takes a lot of effort to get to that point.

Companies are using online communities 

Small, Medium and Large business organizations are all creating and hosting online communities. According to Gartner Group by 2008, the majority of Global 1000 organizations will adopt some form of Web 2.0, of which a major aspect is social networking and community building.

This is a change to how businesses interact 

Online communities represent a way for organizations to interact directly with their customers, partners, and even competitors. It creates the opportunity for new relationships with these groups, and that is one of its greatest promises and achievements. With online tools it becomes much easier to discover, form, and manage relationships, as well as interact, collaborate and interface across them.

The public eye is on online communities

The popularity of Web 2.0 is multifold including new ideas in software development, publishing and, in particular, new ideas in collaboration and interaction. While its arguable what the actual definition of Web 2.0 is the general implication is that there is a change in "idea" behind the Web, that is it's model; it has gone from being a model for publishing (refered to now as Web 1.0) to a model of participation (Web 2.0). This rearranges the view of how both organizations and customers utilize the web.

I should note that participation and collaboration has been a part of the Internet from its earliest days: one of the very first applications was email; with Usenet newsgroups gaining popularity since the 1980s. Still, the rise of new applications such as social tagging, blogging, wikis have empowered individuals to use the web to a much greater degree than ever before. Now it becomes more than a work tool; it is an action social phenomenon.
 

Online community management is a new job role

Social networks and online communities run by organizations need the aid of a new type of support staff. This concept is still emerging, so there are a lot of people who need to know how to use this, what they should be doing, what are good ideas and practices, what are bad ideas and practices, how does the message get spread, who does the work, etc. For individuals working on a personal basis this may be much easier, but for businesses these will remain lingering questions until the generation that is growing up with this technology become the leaders.

This new role of an online community manager is not "people management" per se. In fact, it is more like "program management" where you do not have direct control over the members in your team (your community). It requires some technical knowledge but you don't need to be an IT engineer, programming or system administrator to work in this role. In fact, even though the software tools have become easier, the knowledge of how to use them effectively and properly is getting more complex.

Thus, this is a knowledge engineering role that combines skills of relationship building, leadership, knowledge gathering and distribution, documentation, basic web skills, and even elements of design.  

Not every company that wants to use Web 2.0, wants to build a new application themselves

There is a lot of news around what new Web 2.0 applications and models software companies are building. However, long after the software is built, the number of sites actually running them will probably vastly outnumber them. Consider when the web was built and the number of companies focused on building different kinds of browsers and applications. Some of them are still here and others gone, but the actual number of organizations deploying web sites far outnumber those who created them.

Similarly, there will be a large number of sites that deploy Web 2.0, social networks and online communities, and each of these should have some representative such as a community manager.

Origin of this course 

This course came out of a casual brainstorming with several professors and department heads at the University of Arizona (UofA) and members from our IBM Academic Initiative in Spring 2006. They had several needs:

• find new ways to entice new students to join these majors
• find ways to relate to the current and next generation (Gen Y and Millennials)
• find ways to interact down to the high school level
• and obviously it has to be a useful course for the major

This just happens to coincide with the job I do at IBM developerWorks, which sparked the thought that perhaps we can start some form of education and training around online communities, Web2.0, and social systems. It eventually developed into a more concise idea and focused on the emerging business need for the new role of Community Managers.

Even in IBM, there is a wide range of folks interested in learning more about how the social systems of Web2.0 impacts their business, understand the tools and learn how to work with people. The tools are one thing but I think it's the relationship building behind these online communities that is more significant. 

This is not a new subject and online communities themselves have been around for decades, just in different forms. It's only now with the rising star of Web2.0 that they are getting particular attention that social systems are a core part of the Internet. I don't disagree with the folks who say Web2.0 isn't a necessary term because the very existence of the internet was based on the ability to communicate with others, and collaborate. However, what has changed is the shift from the idea of using the Web just to publish content, to one more focused on collaboration and communities (where I do feel it should be).

Once we had the basic premise for the course identified, we set on creating the table of contents and the syllabus. In fact, this was where Andrea's help was crucial. She has been the outreach coordinator for the MIS department for a while and was already doing summer camps with high-school level students on using such social networking tools. This course takes it to the next level of a business environment and job role for these tools.

Andrea's experience is also how we agreed that it would be even more interesting if we could work with the high school students somehow. This is exactly how the final project came to light: set up each of our college students to work with a group of high school students and see who can help organize, lead and build the best community. It turns out that this kind of outreach down to the high school level is of interest elsewhere too. The hope is that the high school students will see future job role possibilities for themselves, and that MIS is the education path they should consider. So, Andrea has set up the project to work with a local magnet school, Howenstein High.