B F Skinner wrote a book years ago, "Waldon Two". It presents all kinds of interesting ideas about starting up a community with a new culture. I am sure with a few tweeks you could use it for a basis on an on-line community. Good luck

Hey Danielle,

What an interesting class. Best of luck completing your Master's.

While I'm no longer a participant in Mahalo's online community, I have read a few interesting books that relate to online communities and startup culture.

Both of these areas are dynamic and as you know, unique to the people who participate in them. Just like no two communities are alike, a startup culture can not be replicated. This fact makes it difficult for authors to convey anything more than anecdotal events and stories that rely on their experience or observations.

Considering the unique nature of online communities and startup culture, I recommend Drive by Dan Pink.

http://www.danpink.com/drive
http://www.danpink.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/Picture-24-199x300.png

You have asked for a book that presents the "history, practice and dynamics of an online community". Based on the "practice and dynamics" portion of your requirements, it sounds like you're looking for an online community instruction manual (of sorts). I don't believe that this book has been published. Online communities are simply too young and change too quickly for a book to quantify the practice and dynamics of online communities as a whole. If by chance you happen to publish this book as part of your studies, please let me know as I would be very interested to read your perspective.

I suggest Dan Pink's Drive because I strongly believe that motivation is the single most important building block of any online community. If one can attain a true understanding of motivation and in turn, the psychological habits and patterns of people online, then accurate predictions can be made about both the practice and dynamics of online communities.

Drive is a collection of theories about motivation. Throughout the book, you will be presented with examples and excerpts from a variety of research studies and publications. Rather than relaying anecdotal evidence, Drive strives to summarize the research and theories that ask the question, "what motivates people?"

In my mind both online communities and startup culture thrive when their user-bases / employees are motivated. Motivation itself is an elusive beast both for CEO's and Community Managers. If given the opportunity, I would form a presentation that first outlined the history of online communities (starting with BBS's, through Forums, to Blogs, Social Networks and beyond) and then argued the importance of motivation as it relates to each.

My vision of a presentation would simplify the history of online communities into a brief snapshot and use specific sites as examples of the evidence presented in Drive.

While thinking about online communities and startups, watch this video that is based on a TED presentation given by Pink. I think that my proposal may become clear after you do.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

I wish you all the best in your presentation and sincerely hope that this has helped you, Danielle.

If its a community that you've been wanting to see done, work on the components that you and your colleagues/classmates/friends would love to see on it and use often. Following are some good sources for you to look at. Good luck!

Anderson, Benedict R. O'G. (1983). Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso. ISBN 978-0-86091-546-1. OCLC 239999655. http://books.google.com/books?id=4mmoZFtCpuoC.
Barzilai, G. (2003). Communities and Law: Politics and Cultures of Legal Identities. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
Else, Liz & Turkle, Sherry. "Living online: I'll have to ask my friends", New Scientist, issue 2569, 20 September 2006. (interview)
Ebner, W.; Leimeister, J. M.; Krcmar, H. (2009). "Community Engineering for Innovations - The Ideas Competition as a method to nurture a Virtual Community for Innovations". R&D Management. p. 39 (4), pp 342–356. http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/search/allsearch?mode=viewselected&product=journal&ID=122535413&view_selected.x=67&view_selected.y=8.
Farmer, F. R. (1993). "Social Dimensions of Habitat's Citizenry." Virtual Realities: An Anthology of Industry and Culture, C. Loeffler, ed., Gijutsu Hyoron Sha, Tokyo, Japan
Gouvêa, Mario de Paula Leite (18-21 July, 2000). "The Challenges of Building an International Virtual Community Using Internet Technologies". Internet Society INET 2000 conference proceedings. http://www.isoc.org/inet2000/cdproceedings/8j/8j_2.htm.
Hafner, K. 2001. The WELL: A Story of Love, Death and Real Life in the Seminal Online Community Carroll & Graf Publishers (ISBN 0-7867-0846-8)
Hagel, J. & Armstrong, A. (1997). Net Gain: Expanding Markets through Virtual Communities. Boston: Harvard Business School Press (ISBN 0-87584-759-5)
Jones, G. Ravid, G. and Rafaeli S. (2004) Information Overload and the Message Dynamics of Online Interaction Spaces: A Theoretical Model and Empirical Exploration, Information Systems Research Vol. 15 Issue 2, pp. 194–210.
Kim, A.J. (2000). Community Building on the Web: Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities. London: Addison Wesley (ISBN 0-201-87484-9)
Kim, A. J. (2004) (24 January 2004). "“Emergent Purpose. Musings of a Social Architect". http://socialarchitect.typepad.com/musings/2004/01/emergent_purpos.html. Retrieved 4 April 2006.
Kollock, Peter. 1999. "The Economies of Online Cooperation: Gifts and Public Goods in Cyberspace," in Communities in Cyberspace. Marc Smith and Peter Kollock (editors). London: Routledge.
The author has made available an "Online working draft". http://www.connectedaction.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/2001-peter-kollock-economies-of-online-cooperation.htm.
Kosorukoff, A. & Goldberg, D. E. (2002) Genetic algorithm as a form of organization, Proceedings of Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, GECCO-2002, pp 965–972.
Leimeister, J. M.; Ebner, W.; Krcmar, H. (2005). "Design, Implementation and Evaluation of Trust-supporting Components in Virtual Communities for Patients". Journal of Management Information Systems (JMIS). p. 21 (4), pp. 101–136. http://www.jmis-web.org/articles/v21_n4_p101/index.html. Retrieved 23 August 2010.
Leimeister, J. M.; Sidiras, P.; Krcmar, H. (2006). "Exploring Success Factors of Virtual Communities: The Perspectives of Members and Operators". Journal of Organizational Computing & Electronic Commerce (JoCEC). p. 16 (3&4), 277–298. http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a785829167~frm=titlelink.
Morningstar, C. and F. R. Farmer (1990). "The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat, The First International Conference on Cyberspace, Austin, TX, USA". http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html.
Naone, Erica, "Who Owns Your Friends?: Social-networking sites are fighting over control of users' personal information.", MIT Technology Review, July/August 2008
Neus, A. (2001). "Managing Information Quality in Virtual Communities of Practice; Lessons learned from a decade's experience with exploding internet communication". IQ 2001: The 6th International Conference on Information Quality at MIT. http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/neus.pdf. Retrieved 23 August 2010.
Parsell, M. (2008). "Pernicious virtual communities: Identity, polarisation and the Web 2.0. Ethics and Information Technology". Volume 10 Number 1. pp. 41–56.. http://www.springerlink.com/content/p737755248127761/. Retrieved 23 August 2010.
Preece, J. (2000). Online Communities: Supporting Sociability, Designing Usability. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Ltd. (ISBN 0-471-80599-8)
Rheingold, H. (2000). The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. London: MIT Press. (ISBN 0-262-68121-8)
The author has made available an online copy
Rosenkranz, C., Feddersen, C. (2010). "?". Managing viable virtual communities: an exploratory case study and explanatory model. International Journal of Web Based Communities. p. Volume 6, Number 1 5–14. http://inderscience.metapress.com/link.asp?id=j2888h3537761355.
Seabrook, J. 1997. Deeper: My Two-Year Odyssey in Cyberspace Simon & Schuster (ISBN 0-684-80175-2)
Smith, M. "Voices from the WELL: The Logic of the Virtual Commons" UCLA Department of Sociology.
Sudweeks, F., McLaughlin, M.L. & Rafaeli,S. (1998) Network and Netplay Virtual Groups on the Internet, MIT Press.
Portions available online as: Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, 2
Van der Crabben, Jan. "Performed Intimacy in Virtual Worlds". http://www.vandercrabben.com/?p=30.
Barry Wellman, "An Electronic Group is Virtually a Social Network." Pp. 179–205 in Culture of the Internet, edited by Sara Kiesler. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1997. Translated into German as “Die elektronische Gruppe als soziales Netzwerk.” Pp. 134–67 in Virtuelle Gruppen, edited by Udo Thiedeke. Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2000.
Trier, M. (2007) Virtual Knowledge Communities - IT-supported Visualization and Analysis. Saarbrücken, Germany: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller. (ISBN 3-8364-1540-2).
Urstadt, Bryant, "Social Networking Is Not a Business: Web 2.0--the dream of the user-built, user-centered, user-run Internet--has delivered on just about every promise except profit. Will its most prominent example, social networking, ever make any money?", MIT Technology Review, July/August 2008
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I'd suggest the book "F'd Companies: Spectacular Dot-com Flameouts" by Philip J. Kaplan.

For purposes of getting a glimpse into the early lives of various startup companies that flourished but then withered away during the dot com "boom", this is a helpful reference. It doesn't so much focus on communities per se, but it does describe how these various companies initially were wildly successful with the communities they targeted, but them somewhere along the way lost focus or funding or some combination and ended up becoming outmoded and outmaneuvered by the competition.

I can't tell you if it's the best book on online communities, but The Well: A Story of Love, Death & Real Life in the Seminal Online Community should be very interesting for you.

There's a Wired article by the author that should give you a flavor of the book.

Epic Saga of The Well