Please join us for the 2021 Social Media Workshop: '*What Makes an Online Community?*' featuring a plenary by AoIR Past President Professor Axel Bruns (Queensland University of Technology) and a series of lightning talks by University of Sydney researchers: Prof. Eduardo Altmann, Ms Venessa Paech, Dr. Aim Sinpeng, Dr. Olga Boichak, and Dr. Tristram Alexander. The event will be held virtually via Zoom, join via the link below: *When: Tuesday, November 30th 10:00am AEDT *(Monday, November 29th 6:00pm EST) What time is it for me? <https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=What+Makes+an+Online+Community%3F+Social+Media+Workshop+with+Prof+Axel+Bruns&iso=20211130T10&p1=240&ah=2> Where: https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/88452302048 *Plenary: Online Communities and Where to Find Them: Conceptual and Analytical Frameworks (Prof. Axel Bruns, QUT)*Groups, communities, crowds, audiences, publics: the terms we use to describe groupings of online participants are varied, and differ from field to field: the ‘communities’ detected by network mapping algorithms might not qualify as communities from a media and cultural studies perspective, for example. This talk distinguishes some of the key terms used in describing online groupings, and outlines the analytical frameworks that may be used to distinguish them. *Speaker Biographies * *Axel Bruns *is an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow and Professor in the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. His books include Are Filter Bubbles Real? (2019) and Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere (2018), and the edited collections Digitizing Democracy (2019), the Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics (2016), and Twitter and Society (2014). His current work focusses on the study of user participation in social media spaces, and its implications for our understanding of the contemporary public sphere, drawing especially on innovative new methods for analysing 'big social data'. *Eduardo Altmann *is a Professor in Mathematics at the University of Sydney. He is a mathematician/physicist with expertise in the dynamics of natural language, including the use of automated text classification methods and information theoretic measures for classifying text similarity. He, along with co-workers, developed stochastic block model methods for network and text analysis. *Venessa Paech *is an internationally regarded online community expert and educator and a PhD Candidate studying the intersection of AI and online communities at the University of Sydney. She co-founded Australian Community Managers (ACM), the national centre for training and resources. Venessa has developed and teaches the first post-graduate online community management Unit for the University of Sydney. *Olga Boichak *is a Lecturer in Digital Cultures at the University of Sydney, Department of Media and Communications. She has a track record of publications on digital war, legitimising state power, transnational mobilisation, and algorithmic surveillance, and her research interests span networks, narratives, and cultures of activism in the digital age. *Aim Sinpeng *is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney. She is the author of *Opposing Democracy in the Digital Age: The Yellow Shirts in Thailand *(University of Michigan Press, 2021) and co-editor of *From Grassroots Activism to Disinformation: Social Media in Southeast Asia *(ISEAS, 2020). *Tristram Alexander *is a Senior Lecturer in Physics at the University of Sydney. He is a physicist with expertise in the modelling of nonlinear dynamical systems with many interacting elements, including social media dynamics. He has developed a suite of processing tools to identify and analyse communities in Twitter stream data.