Common Craft Blog
Online Community Planning - Getting the Party Started
By leelefever on June 07, 2007 - 11:00am
One of the mantras of the Online Community Unconference became "keeping the party rolling" - not because we partied all day in night, but because many attendees were already in the community business, but looking for ways to improve the experience and value on an ongoing basis. Indeed, the group was a mix of the very experienced and those just getting started.
Speaking of a mix of people, my guess is that that there were about the same number of women as men at the conference and as tech conferences go, that is something different and special.
The session I led was called "New Community Planning" with an appended title of "Getting the Party Started." I was happy to see the party metaphor put to this use and introduced the session with some of my thoughts from my previous post "Your Community is a Party Waiting to Happen." The party metaphor worked well in this case and, as it turned out, I did little talking during the session (a good thing!).
We started off discussing some of the elements that go into getting started with community and I started writing things on a whiteboard. Here are my mostly mental notes, based on what I wrote on the board...
- Look at the communities that exist offline and consider interviewing them or doing a focus group
- Understand the #1 priority of the community - why does it exist?
- Have a strong understanding of the audience
- Define the user - where are they now? What do they need?
- Make sure to have a host or "social director"
- Create an outreach strategy - how will your audience know about the community?
- Ensure that the initial experience is compelling - give people something at the very beginning (people, content, event, etc.)
- Think about the initial discussions that will occur and make sure they are pertinent to the desired audience
- Define what success looks like - is it addressing a need?
- Question - does the organization have a definition that's different?
- Set expectations around the ebb and flow of participation - it will come and go - try to see trends
- Create clear and useful guidelines
- Start small - don't create a large number of forums until the community needs them.
- When thinking of features and tools, relate them to specific purposes - no features for features sake.
- Make it easy and obvious that members should invite their friends
- Show energy - display the flow of member participation - show the community is alive
- Give the members easy ways to learn about and connect with one another
- Understand diversity in terms of new members and veterans - try to find a matching or mentoring system
- Give new members a safe place to ask questions, etc.
- Maintain community life - once members start to feel it, keep looking for ways to promote community
- Have rituals - events or practices that the community can participate in on an ongoing basis - something that is specific to the community
- Enable people to become "gardeners" - people who take care of the community
- Give hosts the ability to mentor other hosts - learn about hosting practices.
- Make hosting a privilege, not a right - consider asking hosts to re-apply after 6 months
- Share the vision of the community with members - enable them to "buy" into the goal of the community
- Balance vision with control - don't let control issues get out of hand
- Be transparent as the hosts and/or the organization - show who you are
All in all, I thought the session turned out well and the attendees had great questions and insights. I owe thanks to Scott Moore , Gail Ann Williams and Jake McKee who contributed a wealth of knowledge and experience.
As for the conference, I was very impressed. The Open Space Technology worked perfectly for the group. All the sessions I attended were lively and informative - people were not bashful about getting involved. Kaliya Hamlin ran the show and Bill Johnston rocked as the MC and organizer.
I was also impressed with the experience of the group, from the originators of online communities like Howard Rheingold , Cliff Figallo and John "Tex" Coate to community managers from eBay, Yahoo, Amazon, Cisco, Microsoft, etc. There was just not enough time to take it all in.
Great Post
Wish I could have attended your party, however I feel like I did with your overview. Thanks. Next time we are at the same conference I will make sure to introduce myself.
Awesome list of ...um...things.
Heh, yeah. That list of notes is great. Excellent capture of the knowledge that has taken many people, many many hours to accumulate.
I, too, wish I could have been there...I love the unconference concept.
Fabulous!
I wish I could have been there... sounds like it was an interesting party.
I think that defining what success looks like is one of the key factors when your trying to enocurage people to set up community networks... it's easy for business to define success... through economic captial... but measuring virtual capital is a little bit harder.
I'm in the process of trying to create a Virtual Research Community, around some of the innovative social research that is taking place in Halifax, Nova Scotia... for some academics, it's not hard to convince them how it can be an enhancement to their traditional research dissemination... but for others, they just view it as more work with little purpose.
But in my ideal world, community groups and academic research could directly connect and share knowledge.
This list is very helpful! Bookmarked now!
We are going to catch up on that
Thanks for that post. Even on your mental white board were enough points we missed when we set up our baby-parent-community.
We are going to catch up on that.
Great post!
Will use your list step by step
Thanks for that useful list. I am currently setting up a lawyer community (ok, sounds strange :-)) - just launched the weblog - and I will use your list item by item next time.