Building the Ideal Digital Community

I was talking to a colleague the other day who urged me to post this paper, which I wrote during grad school a few years ago.

The idea is that the ideal digital community will actually be owned by its users, just as Linux is owned by its developers. While we have seen the "ownership" in a design sense of pages in MySpace and Facebook, we have yet to see a social network completely owned by its participants. Listserv may be the closest thing to participant ownership, but we have yet to see this in a social networking site. So, for example, what if MySpace was a cooperative owned by its users? Would it become a more credible advertising platform or would owners ban advertising? You get the gist.

The conclusion of the paper follows, and the entire paper is here.

Ideal virtual communities enable participant ownership and design, as well as decentralization. There must be a way to combine the methods of Linux development and distributed computing with structured virtual communities. As more mobile devices are Internet enabled, the potential to integrate these abilities in the everyday appear to be possible. What will it look like when distributed computing is applied to affordable housing challenges; or when the trade of goods enabled through virtual networks reduce the amount of garbage discarded; or when car pooling is empowered via trusted, mobile networks? When communities, whether defined by interest or geography, are empowered to truly work together to make decisions, take actions, and solve common problems, then the truly extraordinary may occur.