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Supporting communities on its platforms has been a part of Facebook’s core mission since 2017. Early understandings of the needs of groups and organizers largely centered around groups that began on Facebook itself. This paper is the result of ethnographic research conducted in 2019 to better understand the needs of different types of groups and the corresponding ways that technology platforms do and could support them. The initial orientation towards online groups led to the recognition of the difficulty of managing fast-growing groups but failed to consider whether groups might want to avoid growth in members altogether. We found in our research that many groups in fact did want to avoid or limit their growth in numbers. For these groups, growing as a community meant different things: offering more to existing members, raising awareness, or promoting the group to an outside audience, or simply maintaining over time. Our research was able to connect the dots of why organizers would have different aims between different groups or at different points in time. We ultimately presented our findings in a simple framework of three ‘toolkits’ that technology platforms can provide to meet the different needs of groups and organizers.
Article citation: 2020 EPIC Proceedings pp 87–97, ISSN 1559-8918, https://www.epicpeople.org/epic
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BACKGROUND TO THE PROJECT
In 2017, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, announced the company would have a focus on building the “social infrastructure for community,” or giving people the tools they need to build communities, a major shift from the original focus on connecting family and friends (Zuckerberg 2017). At the keynote for Facebook’s F8 Developer Conference in 2019, Zuckerberg noted that Facebook is “making communities as central as friends” (Bloomberg 2019). Using the lens of community, the company has released new products and design improvements such as putting Groups, Facebook’s product for people to engage with others who share their interests, front and center on the Facebook app experience. As part of this stream of work a new tab made it easier to access Groups and features were introduced to meet the needs of specific types of groups (Facebook 2019).
The work of weaving community into the Facebook app is iterative and ongoing. As such, the Facebook research and product team continues studying how people experience and build community and designing and building products that better support these behaviors. Part of the implicit challenge of this kind of large, long-term initiative is that a large product team needs to be brought along in the journey of learning about how people create and interact with their communities. Therefore, the research needs to shed light on new problem areas as well as helping the product team stakeholders internalize foundational insights that underpin multiple features. The study reported here was meant to further progress on this overall initiative by looking at specific questions, with the findings incorporated into the general narrative understanding about community.
ACADEMIC PERSPECTIVES ON COMMUNITY GROUPS
Academic research on community groups and organizers has primarily focused on community organizing as a response to a problem (Escandón 2010, Mundell et al. 2015) or as a theoretical process (‘Community Development’) that needs to be figured out and perfected by those seeking a particular outcome (Schwartz 1981). In this body of research, ‘communities’ are often taken for granted as homogenous pre-existing units, defined at their limit of geography or demographics.
Studies of online groups have often focused exclusively on virtual communities (Rheingold 2000, Wilson and Peterson 2002), while some theorists of community have sought to deny the possibility of virtual communities at all (Calhoun 1991). In our research we were particularly interested in how groups span the offline and online world and how this balance shifted depending on the group’s primary orientation.
We were interested in groups that were not just responding to a problem or pre-defined by a certain geography or social unit. We wanted to explore as well the communities that are formed, joined and left in a purely voluntary manner. The community groups we encountered more closely resembled the grassroots campaigns characterized by Stokes Jones in an early EPIC paper (2005, 46) as “emergent in nature; as rooted in experiential being together; and as human projects driven by affect and effervescence as much as efficiency and purposiveness.” We saw groups that were emergent projects: overlapping and crisscrossing, coming into or dropping out of existence, of decidedly uncertain long-term viability.
Goodsell and Williamson (2008) provide a wonderful case study of a hybrid community group, a group that would have fit perfectly into our study. For online communities rooted in “geographic-place-as-practice” (253) they provide the following persuasive list of what members need to sustain community: information and explanations, “hot” topics, humor, maintenance of control over interactions, mutual encouragement and connection of online and offline worlds to facilitate interaction in both (260-1). These needs resonate with our findings and their in-depth explanation of a single group focused on urban rejuvenation is enlightening. They do not, however, explore how a group’s needs might change over time or how one group’s needs might differ from another, particularly the differences between groups that are more offline or online oriented.
RESEARCH OBJECTIVE
The study’s goal described in this paper was to understand how people use multiple tools and techniques to create and support community. Our prior research suggested that communities cut across technology platforms. Although some communities may center on a particular digital platform like This Cat is CHONKY, a private Facebook Group for fanciers of plump cats (Kooser 2019), many other communities exist in a number of ways such as a college alumni association that can be supported by email lists, association magazines with updates about classmates, and in-person gatherings.
The study’s other goal was to understand more how community organizers managed their communities across platforms and how community members engaged across platforms. We wanted to understand how they thought of their communities and did their work with a portfolio of tools by both organizers and members. We were curious about how tools were chosen and also how digital tools supplement in-person meetings. The other area of investigation was whether the tools are a permanent part of the community’s communication repertoire or if they might be gradually added, much like the communication repertoire for a person’s social communication (Licoppe 2004). The product team would use this information to understand people’s underlying needs for building and engaging with community and brainstorm ways to improve its portfolio of products to serve unmet needs. We had previously highlighted Facebook Groups as a place for community, and there are other features of the Facebook app like Facebook Events and Pages for businesses and organizations that could be employed.
RESEARCH APPROACH
In light of the research questions around communities that spanned different platforms and wanting to understand both community members and organizers, we designed the study to reach a broad range of group types. Our goal was to get a variety of situations for diverse insights.
While community can be interpreted in many ways, we had a working definition: a collection of people, from which members receive a sense of belonging, connection, and feeling of safety, and to which they give trust and investment over time.
A feeling of safety means an environment that feels secure, where members understand the norms/culture/rules and how they should behave. Members can therefore do not need to worry about inadvertently breaking the rules and they can reveal more of themselves without fearing negative feedback.
Following this definition, whether a group is really a community is subjective and depends on the relationship between the individual and the group. One group member may feel strongly that it is a community for them and another may feel it is not.
Population & Diversity of Group Types
We knew from the outset that we wanted to include a diverse range of groups. We hypothesized that three key variables would carry a considerable impact on our subject matter: the purpose of the group, the role of technology for the group and, temporality.
- The purpose of the group: hobby and interest-based groups, cause-based groups, values-based groups, experience-based groups
- The role of technology: offline-oriented vs. online-oriented vs. hybrid groups
- Temporality: maturity of group in its lifecycle (early-stage vs. well-established); periodicity (seasonal impact and frequency of interactions and activities)
We chose a diverse set of groups so as to uncover different and perhaps unexpected needs and opportunities.
- Religious community groups
- Neighborhood groups (city neighborhood, village groups)
- Local political groups or issue-based groups
- Hobby groups (e.g. cyclists, foodies, photographers, pet lovers)
- Women’s groups, men’s groups, parenting groups
- Immigrant groups
- Charity/fundraising groups
We believed these types of groups would be likely to result in rich discussions of their needs and experiences. We anticipated that they would partake in a range of kinds of interactions (e.g. in-person and online) with different membership structures (e.g. flat vs. vertical organizational structure, single group vs subgroups) and models of participation (e.g. core and peripheral members).
Method
We chose a multi-method approach for this project as we needed to get the most out of a short five days we had together in Madrid. We ran Mobile Diaries before the in-person fieldwork to get a sense of potential participants’ relationships to their groups and ensure we got the right mix of group types. We conducted in-depth interviews to capture detailed accounts of particular groups and the needs and descriptions of the tools used by each group. The team partook in observational immersions of community spaces and group meetings to get a feel for the cultural context and the emotional energy that these spaces and activities engender. Lastly we conducted brief unscheduled intercept interviews with people we approached in public spaces in order to get signal on an even wider array of groups and let us compare our specific sample with random representatives of the ‘general population’ so we could see if our respondents seemed to be outliers in their level of group engagement. Intercepts and immersions also gave us optionality, allowing us to take advantage of spare blocks of time as we felt best suited us in the moment.
KEY FINDINGS
The Role of Offline
Because of the history and culture of Facebook, the nature of online groups and the examples of online communities were always prominent in conversations. It was essential that we learn more about offline-oriented groups to understand how they differed from online-oriented groups and the different role that technology might play for them.
In our interviews, we asked participants to map the groups that were most important to them. Time and time again we saw the same groups closest to the stick figures representing our respondents: la familia, amigos/as de toda la vida, amigos/as del pueblo: family, lifelong friends, friends from my hometown. Many residents of Madrid are originally from small towns, and we often heard about the importance of pueblos, with town associations and annual parties, as a place to return to and be around one’s family and lifelong friends. When we asked about tools and platforms, these groups always ‘lived’ digitally in one place or another, most often as groups on WhatsApp. But while tools kept members of the group in touch, the groups existed in their ‘pure’ form outside and beyond any technology platform.