Chapter 5. Communities, Collaboration, and Conversation
People naturally tend to form communities. They eat lunch with the same people again and again, get together with the same friends on the weekends, and talk with the same co-workers throughout the day. Social interactions on the Web are no different. Bloggers tend to collect into communities as they link to and comment on each other's posts. In discussion forums, there are often groups of participants who form cliques and have very personal interactions that extend beyond the purpose of the forum.
When running a social website, it is important to encourage and support the development of communities. Elgg does this through its groups tool, which helps organize people and content. Elgg also comes with tools for collaboratively editing content and for communicating with other users. As in the previous chapter, the discussion of each tool is divided into four sections: creating content, viewing content, sample use cases, and possible customizations...
