Pattern Languages for Social Software
Dan Dixon, who worked with us to help us define our ’social architecture’ and to develop our initial product roadmap, has a chapter called Pattern Languages for CMC Design in the forthcoming Handbook of Research on Socio-Technical Design and Social Networking Systems. It will be a chunky tome, over 1,000 pages, but even so a list price of $495 does sound like they are actively discouraging individuals from buying it. If you are a student, or work at a large corporate enterprise, I guess you could hassle your library to pick up a copy. Otherwise you might have to settle for reading Dan’s blog.
As I said at the time:
The patterns workshop (which Dan and Ed ran for us) gave us a way of thinking about what we wanted to build that neatly bridged the gap between vague hand waving about ‘community’ and getting sucked down into the nitty gritty of interface design.
If you think you could use some similar help I highly recommend getting in touch with them.