Community: issues, definitions, and operationalization on the web

This paper addresses the concepts of community and online community and discusses the physical, functional, and symbolic characteristics of a community that have formed the basis for traditional definitions. It applies a four-dimensional perspective of space and place (i.e., shape, structure, context, and experience) as a framework for refining the definition of traditional offline communities and for developing a definition of online communities that can be effectively operationalized. The methods and quantitative measures of social network analysis are proposed as appropriate tools for investigating the nature and function of communities because they can be used to quantify the typically subjective social phenomena generally associated with communities.