Amy Jo Kim
NAIMA

Digital cities hold the promise of reinvigorating community involvement --but only if they're designed to meet the needs of the participants. All too often, the technology that's used to create online social spaces becomes an end in itself, rather than a means for connecting people with specific needs, habits, and abilities.

In this presentation, I'll provide an overview of the most important and useful "community technologies" currently available for building and maintaining social relationships, with a special emphasis on the differences between facilitating small groups and extended networks. I'll also present a comprehensive design framework that models online communities as "social ecosystems," and explain how this framework can be used to design digital cities that truly meet the needs of their core constituents.

Amy Jo Kim, Ph.D. is the Founder and Creative Director of NAIMA (www.naima.com), a design studio specializing in cutting-edge Web communities. NAIMA's clients include Adobe, BBC, eBay, Electronic Arts, Kaiser Permanente, Maxis, MTV, Nickelodeon, Paramount, Sony, and Yahoo. She's also the author of Community-Building on the Web (www.naima.com/community), a strategic handbook for community designers that's available in six languages, and has become required reading worldwide in top design and consulting firms. Dr. Kim teaches online community design at Stanford University, and lives in Northern California with her husband and son (www.naima.com/community/dedication.html).

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