For communities to exist, two specific attributes must exist:
1) A web of "affect-lade relationships" (Etzioni 80) creates and reenforces relationships within the community. These relationships criss-cross with each other to create the "web" that is essential for community. In this same vein, one user stated that Plans was "a web of disorganized, flawed . . . and yet interesting communication." For Plans, plan love directed at individuals allows for semi-intimate conversations to occur. However, there is no space at present for private conversations, so other users may follow, or even join in, other conversations with people they do – or do not – know.
2) The second requirement for community is "a measure of commitment to a set of shared values, mores, meanings, and a shared historical identity – in short, a culture" (Etzioni 81). With the controversy over Secrets (see "Secrets" on A Short Introduction to Plans' Features), esoteric terms (rollover for definition: "permalove," "plansturbation," "planversation," "planhacking," "plan wars"), and other Plans-specific features, there is little doubt that Plans has its own culture. Also, the Grinnell College culture spills over into the Plans environment leading to debate on current topics. This fact leads to the conclusion that Plans is a hybrid community. This will be expanded upon in the next section.
Building further on the two main aspects of community, there are six more specific facets of a community. To at least some extent, Plans satisfies all of them. The terms and definitions of the six facets are borrowed from Amitai and Oren Etzioni as written in the their book The Monochromatic Society (82-96).
Access, means the literal ability to communicate. Anyone with a Plans account (which requires a Grinnell e-mail address) has this. As long as there is an available computer — which is almost always trues with the large number of computer labs and personal computers — there are few barriers to accessing the community and communicating within it.
The type of access, though, is very different from face-to-face communication. Because Plans is always accessible, students can log in and write, read, or respond to plans at their convenience. Communications on Plans — and in virtual communications in general — can, therefore, be "asynchronous." (Etzioni 83). While this lengthens the time between responses, it allows Plans-users to communicate with multiple people at one time and when it is most convenient for them. In a busy college atmosphere, this can be a huge advantage in communication.
In contrast to an online gossip forum or a real-world conference of neurosurgeons, communities require that knowledge of individuals go beyond a specific type. People must be able to connect specific knowledge with specific identities. They must also trust communications and hold people accountable for them.
Because current students on Plans live geographically near the other students on Plans, many people at least know of a large number of Plans users before reading their plans. With access to the Grinnell College directory — or the aptly named "StalkerNet" as it is known on campus — anonymity is impossible with the exception of Secrets. After a Plans user was arrested for writings on Plans last year, there is also little doubt left to accountability. Regardless of the justification of the arrest or other responses to plans, there is certainly attention paid to any controversial information posted on Plans.
The concept of interactive broadcasting is not as complex as the term first sounds. Community requires that information can be communicated on both a large and small scale. Plans allows for both of these with general postings and messages directed at specific people via plan love. Once messages have been sent out, feedback must have a way to be posted to the general population and to individuals. Again, this helps to create the "criss-cross web" that is essential for communities.
Directed plan love appears to be incredibly effective, so much so that 84% of all respondents said they "usually respond to plan love" and 81% said they "usually received a response to plan love [they gave]." For students specifically, these percentages were each about 3% lower; however, this can be explained by the availability of face-to-face communication (see Plans: A Hybrid Community for a more detailed description of alternate forms of communication stemming from Plans). While all posts are transparent and available for all to see, "planversations" using plan love-directed messages appear to still be an effective means of conversing.
Of the necessary functions for a community, "breakout and reassemble" may be the weakest function of Plans. Related to interactive broadcasting, breakout and reassembly is the ability to depart from a larger conversation, have a smaller side one, and then return to the group. A real life example of this would be the use of subcommittees by groups. As mentioned earlier, the ability to direct specific comments at people with plan love makes up for some of this but not all. For true breakout and reassembly, another form of communication is required. Other forms of communication stemming from Plans will be addressed in the next section.
One constant problem in face-to-face communications is the amount of time between statements, responses, counter-responses, and so on. Reactions are almost instant and little time is left to reconsider thoughts before verbalizing them. In heated conversation, emotions can gain a grip over statements and rational thought can fall to the way side. So, for computer-mediated communication, the built-in delay between statements helps to facilitate a more balanced and thought-out set of communications. Even though there is almost no time required to see a post and respond, typing is slower than talking, and, if quickly reconsidered, a Plans user can remove a recently-entered comment before anyone reads it.
The last requirement for community is memory. As the Etzioni brother's write, "communal sharing of culture never starts from a tabla rasa" (93). As pointed out earlier, the Grinnell College community gives a pretext to the Plans community. However, when it comes to remembering communications of the past, Plans, in some ways at least, bests the real world in its archiving ability. In face-to-face communication, most "archiving" is done solely with the mind and then information is passed on verbally. In the Plans community, many conversations are archived for an extended period of time. Overall, 54% of survey respondents never deleted anything from their plan (although the Plans system does eventually begin to cut off entries once a plan has reached a certain size, months of entries are contained in many full plans). However, in the student body, an even higher 63% of users never deleted entries from their plan. On top of this, 41% and 32%, respectively, retain recent entries ("recent" was left open to the interpretation of the respondent). So, much correspondence through Plans is maintained for months and available for reference to anyone who comes across it.
Because Plans satisfies each of these six broad requirements for community in some form, it would be reasonable to classify Plans as it's own community of alumni, faculty, staff, and students. Yet, it would be irresponsible to ignore the large role which Grinnell College plays in the Plans community, as I will show in Plans: A Hybrid Community.