danah has a set of questions about awards for 'community sites' for the Webby Awards and Ars Electronica: This is just the right set of questions -- the value of a _site_ and the value of the _community_ are hardly parallel. As an example, Bronze: Beta, home of Buffistas is by any technical measure completely dreadful -- a non-threaded write-only dumping ground that should be dead in the water. _Eppur si muove._ Now you'd be tempted to say that B:B has a good community despite the technology, except that it was designed to spec -- the crappiness is intentional. After the old Bronze boards were shut down, the community rallied to build themselves a new home, and the spec for that home included having a single page with a posting form at the top, as if it were a web BBS ca. 1994. When they were re-building Parliment after WWII, Winston Churchill is (said to have) said "Whatever you do, don't put enough seats in for everybody," on the grounds that, in the old Parliment building, when some matter came up that was important enough for all the members of Parliment to show up at once, the place got uncomfortably crowded, which re-enforced the sense of urgency. The surface inadequacy provided deep value. Bronze: Beta is like that (setting aside the difference between Buffy gossip and political discourse that affects the lives of millions.) It isn't just a good community site despite the limited technology, its a good community in part because of the limited technology -- the limits help shape the community (see the post below this one on Ward's 'limit as a social tool' hack.) I'm pleased to see community as a concern in both camps (though I trust Ars to find more interesting candidates than the Webbys) but like danah I think there's a misfit between actual community and what the award givers are looking for.