We all recognize a successful community in our neighborhood: Good schools, affordable housing, plentiful jobs, thriving businesses, clean parks, and modern roads. Bowling alleys and bike trails help too. But when an organization seeks to set up a successful online community, the vision can be more blurry.

Lately, I've been attempting to illustrate a view for successful online communities, as part of an article I prepared for Idealware. It's titled Characteristics of Successful Online Communities.

I use a neighborhood metaphor because I think it's helpful to paint a vision that's divorced from traditional success measures such as member counts, user postings and the like. Although I'm always happy to talk about web metrics, during community conception, success should be envisaged from the member's perspective first because if they don't like your community, they won't return. Metrics don't always clarify exactly why people will be drawn to your online community. And unlike a physical community, there's no lease or mortgage payment tying them down once they move in.

Recognizing this, I attempt to catalog the features and management practices that are often associated with healthy and thriving online communities. Modeling your community on these attributes doesn't guarantee success, of course. After all "success" is achieving the goals you set for yourself. But I hope that your community planning and solution selection will be aided by the user-centric vision described in my article. I hope you like it, and enthusiastically welcome your comments.