Encouraging discussion about building and managing communities

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I’d like to dig a bit deeper into these questions together:

  • what kinds of discussions about community building and community management we want to encourage here on meta?
  • what kind of structure and/or shifts in behavior from our most engaged users might better encourage that?

As part of our recent shuffling around of categories, we made the following changes to our “community” category:

  • Renamed #community to #community-building
  • Moved the following categories underneath it as subcategories
    • #data-reporting → #community-building:data-reporting
    • #praise → #community-building:praise
    • #praise:comparison → #community-building:comparison

Some of the initial feedback was that it’s not feeling quite right though:

I’m hoping to first take what we learn here to inform some additional tweaks to make to category organization, but I think it’s also fine if other ideas come out of this that we might want to try now or in the future.

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2

I think one of the high points of discussions in the category was Steph’s discussion on migrating a community from Facebook to Discourse. It definitely taught me a thing or two about community building & Discourse features.

Although there’s already quite a bunch of topics on exploring different communities with certain features, I’d be interested to see more discussions on such migrations. I feel that they really could be informative.

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Indeed moving away from toxic environments is an important point and should be encouraged and documented.

Then, how to build a non-toxic community is important, as are all the tools that will help (thinking about Elinor Ostrom institutional arrangements here, and The Art of Hosting Good Conversations Online by Howard Rheingold, that remains a classic). Indeed, Discourse provides a fantastic set of tools from building and managing communities, probably the best starting point we’ve ever known for online communities, but then as with every software, the way you use it is as important as what features it provides. Some old email, Usenet or IRC communities remain, not because of their tooling, but because of their institutional arrangements and the boundaries, rules, coping mechanisms and sanctions they have put in place over the years.

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