Virtual communities are increasingly ubiquitous, but how valuable are they for the creation of meaningful connections that may never have the chance to form in real life?  That’s the question posed by a new report from The GovLab.

The report is based upon interviews with 50 Facebook community leaders from 17 countries, as well as conversations with industry experts and a global survey featuring 15,000 people from 15 countries who are currently members of either virtual or in-person communities.  The results suggest that virtual communities can be at least as potent as their offline peers, if not more so.

“Around the world, people who are otherwise voiceless in physical space are becoming powerful leaders of groups that confer a true sense of meaning and belonging for their members,” the researchers say. “This brief report, which tells the stories of several of those leaders and how they govern global communities is, we hope, the beginning of greater and much needed study of online groups and their impact on social and political life.”

Giving a voice

For instance, the Female IN (FIN) was created to provide a safe space for Nigerian women overseas to gain support on a wide range of issues, from abuse to grief, relationship difficulties, and health issues.  The community has grown organically to over 1.8 million members across 100 countries.

Or you have the Canterbury Residents Group, which provides a public square type facility for residents of the British city of Canterbury.  The 38,000 members of the community is only just below the size of the city’s actual population.

Membership of online communities was found to provide just as strong a sense of community as membership of offline communities.  Online communities are also fluid organizations that can often attract members and leaders who are marginalized in physical society.  As a result, it’s perhaps no surprise that many online communities have a counter-cultural vibe to them.

The communities are also often run as a labor of love, with leaders neither paid nor trained, with the rules of the community as likely to be informal and uncodified as anything more formal.  As such, the groups are often quite emergent, despite their huge size, and can therefore often fly under the radar of policymakers.

“Online groups are significant contemporary organizations that can generate impact, and provide their members with a strong sense of community and belonging, despite not operating in physical space,” the authors conclude.

“More research is needed to understand whether and how these groups will operate as genuine communities over the long term, especially given the tensions that derive from conducting public life on a private platform such as Facebook, and how such groups and their leaders can be supported to ensure they provide maximum voice, participation and benefit to their members.”