Social Network Analysis is utilized in Haythornwaite's 2007 paper as a tool for studying the exchanges and interactions of communities. According to SNA, these communities can be classified as comprising nodes and ties: nodes stand in for people and groups, and ties connect different notes of people.
A good example of a community to be analyzed in in terms of SNA is the same one I used in my last blog, the message board community of Pojo.com, of which I served as a moderator for several years. This message board has tens of thousands of members, and while not all of them are active, there are still thousands that are, making it a pretty massive community. As a result, there could be many things to classify as nodes: since the board focuses on gaming but is not exclusive to any one game, various nodes could be the different users who frequent the boards for different games. These nodes could contain anywhere from a dozen or so people for the smaller games to well into the thousands for the more popular ones.
And to be sure, there were plenty of people who frequented the boards for more than one game; these served as ties, which allowed for the bridging of gaps between the games. This in addition to several areas of the board set aside for general talk and other topics allowed for the development of a cohesive identity for all users of the board as people who went to Pojo.com, despite its size. Also to be taken into consideration should be the fact that with thousands of users playing the same game, firmer common ground obviously emerged within those nodes than within the community as a whole; but the fact that the users, united by the fact that they all at least played some game for which boards existed on Pojo and chose to use Pojo's boards instead of its rivals was, at least, common ground that was strong enough. Indeed, a strong tie among some of the older members existed between the ones who had been active on the boards throughout its previous incarnations and older versions.
Obviously this is a community that came to exist through CMC and is thus very strongly affected by it, but individual nodes often come to be because various groups of people united on certain 'teams' (groups of people who played to win prizes in big tournaments together, even though they were mostly individual games) or by geographical closeness - through FtF interactions, one person would join and then tell his friends, who would join, and so forth. So on a smaller level, CMC and the community in general served as a tool to strengthen the ties between local nodes of people.
And conversely, the community has also led to many FtF meetings for people who otherwise never would have encountered one another. People post messages looking for rides to various tournaments; the site becomes a resource for locating other site members with whom to meet up at large, FtF events. I personally have met many people who recognized me from my role as a moderator on the message boards, just because the board was such a massive community that it had members everywhere, including the places I would go locally.
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Interesting topic. I think what interests me in particular is that the entire Gemeinschaft began online versus beginning in FtF and that it is a forum, which can be hard to create a community in. I think over time you definitely have created a community which can definitely have common ground which you pointed out – it is based on games. I think what is also great is that you have a lot of reciprocity in engaging in conversations about the games that you play. I think that in the future, the ties with your group will only get stronger as you have more FtF interactions due the increased cues you will receive. It sounds like an interesting forum, ill have to check it out sometime.
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