BuddyPress.org

https://buddypress.org/community/groups/miscellaneous/forum/topic/the-buddypress-ui-design-and-conceptual-approach-to-social-networking/#post-51851
Defining a Social Network / Community

I guess one of the major points is to establish quite what we all mean or refer to when using phrases such as social network or community and what type of content is deemed to be important.

Within that definition there must exist a set of core features that enable that concept and an understanding of quite what users expect from it.

Therefore it may be helpful to establish a set of criteria, roughly agreed, on that constitutes the concept. This criteria is essentially what is provided to the end user, or member; for example we might say that a community revolves around the members ability to interact through the exchange of views in a forum type manner. We might agree that ‘Updates’ are not necessarily that important or that they can tend to give rise to confusion.

To note is that this is not about added functionality i.e plugins but the core offering that enables the ‘Community’ to exist and begin interacting. To my mind plugins should only ever be a means of enhancing the app, but never absolutely essential in order for a given community to work.

Lastly, and this might prove impractical in reality, as a means of tracking responses that relate to this initial parent comment and given that ideally comments would be threaded to this parent we could preface a comment along the lines that I have at the top with a link to this comment?

Again an idea that might prove impractical in reality – but a crude attempt at aggregating any responses along the lines of the two main questions could be made in this post; a simple bullet point list, e.g top ten under two headings:

Defining the concept of Community and it’s activity.

Defining core features that facilitate that community activity.