Communities, Neighborhoods, and User-Created Groups in the Awareness Platform

Overview

Awareness provides an online platform that allows users to interact andcommunicate. The key building blocks for organizing information in theAwareness platform are Communities, Neighborhoods, and Categories. Thisdocument defines these building blocks and discusses best practices for their use.

Communities

A Community is an online space where users can interact and communicatearound common ideas, tasks, concepts, or goals. Within a Community, users caninteract in many ways including:

• posting their thoughts in their personal blogspace

• creating a profile to describe themselves

• collaborating with others on editable wiki documents

• participating in discussions

• tagging material so that it’s easier to find

• rating and commenting on contributed content

• sharing photos and videos

• uploading podcasts for training or general education

• and, generally speaking, capitalizing on the wealth ofWeb 2.0 technologies that are fast emerging

A Community is also a place for users to meet other users with similarinterests or experiences.

Using the Awareness platform, enterprises can create Communities forinternal-facing users (employees), external-facing users (customers or partners),or a mix of internal and external users. Communities created by Awareness arefully-branded to match the desired enterprise look-and-feel, and are hostedby Awareness.

A single Community can have a number of functions and a wide range ofcontent. Neighborhoods and Categories are organizational constructs that helpto organize functionality and content within a Community. These constructs aredefined in the sections below.

Communities, Neighborhoods, andCategories in the Awareness Platform

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Neighborhoods

Neighborhoods are spaces within the Community that help organize theCommunity. A Community can start with several Neighborhoods if it’s clearwhich major areas of focus the enterprise would like to encourage.Alternately a Community can start without any Neighborhoods and thenbegin adding them as participation increases and major topics begin toemerge. Neighborhoods help organize by grouping content at a high-level.They act as the “home page” for a particular area of focus within theoverall Community.

Neighborhoods can be mapped to different kinds of things. For example, inan internal-facing and more private Community, Neighborhoods might mapto Business Units, Functional Areas, and/or Regions. For an external-facingcustomer discussion site, Neighborhoods might map to the typesof customers targeted by the Community (e.g. Application Users,Administrators, 3rd Party Developers).

Neighborhoods can have distinct appearances (banner and graphics) anddistinct functionality sets (available widgets) from other areas of theCommunity. This allows them to be tailored to their particular targetfunctional areas. Neighborhoods also can have distinct access control rulesto govern who is allowed to view, comment, edit or author content withinthe Neighborhood.

Community

NeighborhoodCategory Category

Category Category Category Category



Categories

Categories are logical groupings that allow information to be filtered within a Community or Neighborhood. Categories providea way of segmenting content around a specific topic. Unlike a Neighborhood, a Category does not have a distinct appearanceor functionality set.

Like Neighborhoods, Categories can have distinct access control rules to govern who is allowed to view content withinthat Category.

Some examples of how Categories can be implemented:

• In an internal-facing private community, with a Neighborhood called “Sales Team”, there could be the followingCategories: “Product Discussion”, “Q&A”, “Recent Wins”, “Process and procedures”, “Compensation Plans”,and “General Talk”. In this example, access to “Compensation Plans” would be restricted to only a subset ofauthorized users.

• In an external-facing public community with a Neighborhood called “Corporate Responsibility”, there could be thefollowing Categories: “Conservation and Recycling”, “Fair Trade”, and “Employees Giving Back”

The following screen shot shows a sample Community that is using Neighborhoods to create spaces for different business unitswithin the enterprise and Categories (branded in the Community as “Topics”) to organize content within the Neighborhoods:



Neighborhood

Community

Categories

PromotionsIn-StoreMarketingTechnologyBusinessUpcoming EventsHeadlinesPersonalAwarenessTechnologyBusinessUpcoming EventsIn the Headlines

TOPICS

BUSINESS CORPORATION

Customer CommunicationsGroup

Which Building Block is Appropriate When?

The following guidelines will help indicate what is required when an enterprisewishes to deliver new functionality with the Awareness platform.

New Community or New Neighborhood?

• Does the new functionality represent a significantly different common idea,task, concept or goal than the current Community?

• Does the new functionality require a new distinct web address?

• Does the new functionality serve a different set of users than the currentCommunity?

If the answer to any of these questions is “yes”, it is likely that a new Community isrequired to provide the desired functionality. If the answers to all of the abovequestions are “no”, it is likely that a new Neighborhood or Category can serve thenew functional area.

New Neighborhood or New Category?

• Does the new functional area require its own branding, appearance,or its own sense of identity within the enterprise?

• Does the area require different widgets or interfaces than the rest of theCommunity? (e.g. geo-tagging, photo sharing, wikis, , etc)

• Will the new functional area serve as a “mini-home” page for a particulartopic or group of users?

• Will the new functional area have enough content that it will be organizedinto categories and sub categories?

• Will the new functional area contain a substantial amount of information?

• Will the content in this area need to be moderated by a specific administrator?

If the answer to any of the above questions is “yes”, it is likely that a newNeighborhood will best provide the desired functionality. If the answer to all of theabove questions is “no”, the creation of a new Category will likely serve the need.


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