1. Communities, Neighborhoods, and
Categories in the Awareness Platform
Overview
Awareness provides an online platform that allows users to interact and
communicate. The key building blocks for organizing information in the
Awareness platform are Communities, Neighborhoods, and Categories. This
document defines these building blocks and discusses best practices for their use.
Communities
A Community is an online space where users can interact and communicate
around common ideas, tasks, concepts, or goals. Within a Community, users can
interact in many ways including:
• posting their thoughts in their personal blogspace
• creating a profile to describe themselves
• collaborating with others on editable wiki documents
• participating in discussions
• tagging material so that it’s easier to find
• rating and commenting on contributed content
• sharing photos and videos
• uploading podcasts for training or general education
• and, generally speaking, capitalizing on the wealth of
Web 2.0 technologies that are fast emerging
A Community is also a place for users to meet other users with similar
interests or experiences.
Using the Awareness platform, enterprises can create Communities for
internal-facing users (employees), external-facing users (customers or partners),
or a mix of internal and external users. Communities created by Awareness are
fully-branded to match the desired enterprise look-and-feel, and are hosted
by Awareness.
A single Community can have a number of functions and a wide range of
content. Neighborhoods and Categories are organizational constructs that help
to organize functionality and content within a Community. These constructs are
defined in the sections below.
www.awarenessnetworks.com

2. Communities, Neighborhoods, and
Categories in the Awareness Platform
Community
Category Category Neighborhood
Category Category Category Category
Neighborhoods
Neighborhoods are spaces within the Community that help organize the
Community. A Community can start with several Neighborhoods if it’s clear
which major areas of focus the enterprise would like to encourage.
Alternately a Community can start without any Neighborhoods and then
begin adding them as participation increases and major topics begin to
emerge. Neighborhoods help organize by grouping content at a high-level.
They act as the “home page” for a particular area of focus within the
overall Community.
Neighborhoods can be mapped to different kinds of things. For example, in
an internal-facing and more private Community, Neighborhoods might map
to Business Units, Functional Areas, and/or Regions. For an external-facing
customer discussion site, Neighborhoods might map to the types
of customers targeted by the Community (e.g. Application Users,
Administrators, 3rd Party Developers).
Neighborhoods can have distinct appearances (banner and graphics) and
distinct functionality sets (available widgets) from other areas of the
Community. This allows them to be tailored to their particular target
functional areas. Neighborhoods also can have distinct access control rules
to govern who is allowed to view, comment, edit or author content within
the Neighborhood.
www.awarenessnetworks.com

3. Communities, Neighborhoods, and
Categories in the Awareness Platform
Categories
Categories are logical groupings that allow information to be filtered within a Community or Neighborhood. Categories provide
a way of segmenting content around a specific topic. Unlike a Neighborhood, a Category does not have a distinct appearance
or functionality set.
Like Neighborhoods, Categories can have distinct access control rules to govern who is allowed to view content within
that Category.
Some examples of how Categories can be implemented:
• In an internal-facing private community, with a Neighborhood called “Sales Team”, there could be the following
Categories: “Product Discussion”, “Q&A”, “Recent Wins”, “Process and procedures”, “Compensation Plans”,
and “General Talk”. In this example, access to “Compensation Plans” would be restricted to only a subset of
authorized users.
• In an external-facing public community with a Neighborhood called “Corporate Responsibility”, there could be the
following Categories: “Conservation and Recycling”, “Fair Trade”, and “Employees Giving Back”
The following screen shot shows a sample Community that is using Neighborhoods to create spaces for different business units
within the enterprise and Categories (branded in the Community as “Topics”) to organize content within the Neighborhoods:
Community
BUSINESS CORPORATION
Customer Communications
Group
Neighborhood
Categories
TOPICS
Promotions
In-Store
Marketing
Technology
Business
Upcoming Events
Headlines
Personal
Awareness
Technology
Business
Upcoming Events
In the Headlines
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4. Communities, Neighborhoods, and
Categories in the Awareness Platform
Which Building Block is Appropriate When?
The following guidelines will help indicate what is required when an enterprise
wishes to deliver new functionality with the Awareness platform.
New Community or New Neighborhood?
• Does the new functionality represent a significantly different common idea,
task, concept or goal than the current Community?
• Does the new functionality require a new distinct web address?
• Does the new functionality serve a different set of users than the current
Community?
If the answer to any of these questions is “yes”, it is likely that a new Community is
required to provide the desired functionality. If the answers to all of the above
questions are “no”, it is likely that a new Neighborhood or Category can serve the
new functional area.
New Neighborhood or New Category?
• Does the new functional area require its own branding, appearance,
or its own sense of identity within the enterprise?
• Does the area require different widgets or interfaces than the rest of the
Community? (e.g. geo-tagging, photo sharing, wikis, , etc)
• Will the new functional area serve as a “mini-home” page for a particular
topic or group of users?
• Will the new functional area have enough content that it will be organized
into categories and sub categories?
• Will the new functional area contain a substantial amount of information?
• Will the content in this area need to be moderated by a specific administrator?
If the answer to any of the above questions is “yes”, it is likely that a new
Neighborhood will best provide the desired functionality. If the answer to all of the
Contact Information: above questions is “no”, the creation of a new Category will likely serve the need.
Awareness, Inc.
880 Winter Street, Suite 300
Waltham, MA 02451
United States
Tel: 1 866 487 5623
Fax: 1 781 622 2378
Awareness Canada
5050 South Service Road, Suite 100
Burlington, ON L7L 5Y7
Canada
© 2008 AWARENESS, INC.
Tel: 1 866 487 5623
Fax: 1 905 632 4922