What is the exact Meaning of The Community Spirit?

Community Building
18

I moderated a long running forum of yoga lovers. It has been around for 15 years. The people on that board are still great friends and still have strong business ties because of the amazing spirit we had on our board.

It’s true, even lovely topics like yoga can get really out of hand. Here are some of my ideas about how to create a strong spirit:

  • Strong leadership from the top of an attitude of openness, sharing, connection over division. It’s important that the person at the center of the three ring circus have the respect of the members for their accomplishments in their field, and it’s important that this person participates and demonstrates the spirit of the board.

  • Great software that allows the use of emojis, pictures, GIFs, and offline connections. Chat features are nice but can add a weird element, especially as relationships between men and women get really flirty in chat.

  • Have a way for people to connect in the real world safely. This is one of the main things that we had that other people did not. Because we were centered around the teachings of an teacher who traveled widely to teach, we were able to meet up in person safely at his events. At one point, at any of his workshops there would be 5 or more people from our discussion board there. We had one event that was pre-announced on our discussion board that sold out - a very large event - just from the announcement on our board. We also had 4 large “gatherings” just for our discussion board members (but in the spirit of our board, there were always a few people who had never participated who got dragged there by friends or who were just happened to read about the event and decided to show up).

  • Rules are nice but it’s important that when things get rough that you train people to interact with each other in ways that model kindness and respect. Then people can model the skills and others can see that we can disagree but we can still put our relationships above all else.

  • One thing I wish I’d done more of was create cooling off periods for bad actors. Be willing to ban jerks.

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