SPENCE: A Model of online/offline community

Abstract

Online and offline community are both studied but not as an intersection. There is a gap in the literature on the nature of community that is blended online with offline and geographically situated.
SPENCE, a Model of online/offline community with measurement principles - capabilities - was formulated. It aims to provide an integrated view of residential online/offline community that offers a lens of synthesis. It is based on the definition: social exchange using channels of digital multi-media and physical expression, leading to permanent social ties connected across social graphs, from proximity informed by a diversity of values, interests and needs, bounded in settlement combining physical and cyber place, curated by an entrepreneur.
SPENCE has six facets - settlement, proximity, exchange, net/latticework, channels and entrepreneur; and four capabilities - trust, influence, information and intelligence. iii Two Case Studies, based on online/offline communities in London, deployed the methods of interview, survey and online social network study to discover the nature of online/offline community, how to investigate it and what policy initiatives could be implemented to develop it. The Survey and Twitter Study methods were merged into a Twofold Instrument.
The contributions of the thesis are: the Model SPENCE; novel concepts derived from the Model i.e. decile fabric, net/latticework, VINs ratio, diverse cohesion, specific cohesion, and capabilities, which offer updates on established concepts. The affordances of online/offline community include situated cognition, blended relations between people with cohesions in the social fabric predicated on a greater exchange of informal/formal assets. It is recommended that national digital infrastructure is developed to extend online/offline community, either as independent instances or as an integrated national platform. A twofold investigation method, measuring the national total of decile fabric, would offer a pragmatic automated approach to assist a national development programme.

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ORCID for Leslie Carr: orcid.org/0000-0002-2113-9680

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