• Social platforms and businesses are moving towards smaller communities
  • There is a general push towards smaller communities in social media platforms
    1. Platforms that emphasize community over massive, unconnected social pools
    2. Interactions between users that create value; features and tools in the market that nudge towards this interactive value-creation
  • This has multiplied the value of community in business and social life – this is a great enabler for learning communities
    • Examples of Community-driven businesses
• The depth and breadth of these communities is much stronger than previous online communities.
  • While in the past these communities were an extension of physical circles, the nature of online learning communities of the 2020s are online-first, have deeper cultural ties among members, and are now exploring ways to become economically sustainable.
  • As humans' identity is increasingly shaped by their online identity, the cultural and geographical differences that once represented a barrier to cohesion for online members are falling apart - when "internet culture" is your primary culture, your online community is your nation and university.

What's Next for the Internet?

David Bowie predicted in 1999 the impact of the Internet in BBC interview

We can group communities by their purpose – learning communities are only a small subset of these!

• Personal/Belonging Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn
• Learning: built on top of a layer of peer learning, often enhanced by software. Examples: online bookclubs
  • Eisen (1999): six qualities of peer partnerships: voluntary involvement, trust, non-hierarchical status, duration and intensity of the partnership leading to closeness, mutuality and authenticity
• Customer support
  • Eighty-one percent of companies have an online support community in which customers can ask other customers for technical help and troubleshooting.
• Management/Organization: DAOs, coops
• Knowledge: wikis
• Economic/Professional: HireClub, LinkedIn, Bravado, Github, Kaggle
  • People spend 41% of their time online with colleagues in professional networks, followed by friends, family, and experts.
• Product development and marketing
  • 54% of marketers launched a branded community because customers frequently gave product feedback and ideas.
• Purchasing decision: Glossier
  • Customers spend 19% more after joining a company’s online community.
  • 77% of companies believe that an online community significantly improves brand exposure, awareness and credibility.

Economic/professional communities (65% of jobs are filled through personal networks) and learning (proven benefits in peer learning and the scalability of software) are growing quickly among these groups