Working Group on Communities of Practice?

Community
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I’m actively wrestling with Discourse as my platform of choice to develop a community of practice. I.e. the community’s goal is for members not only to “engage” (read, learn, react, comment/reply, and write thoughtful new topics), but actively to use the community space as collaborative support for their own practice, i.e. for their own activities and projects going on in real life. (In my case I’m focused on lifelong learning for a particular group of folks, taking a particular approach.)

And I will say I’m wrestling. I chose Discourse over more trendy community platforms after trying a bunch of them and participating in a variety of communities hosted on them, including Circle, Heartbeat, Mighty Networks, Discord, Slack, and course-related add-ons (Thinkific). My decision was fairly complicated, but suffice to say, I’m determined to make it work on Discourse.

That said, given the relatively technical nature of Discourse, I could really use a like-minded working group of folks here at Meta who might be working on something similar, i.e. how to bend the power and flexibility of the platform to my (and my anticipated members’) will, to our needs and use cases. In particular I’m looking for slightly less-techie folks who are starting and running communities not so much for brand or support purposes, but as interest-based groups, where the aim is, as mentioned, not just engagement, but practice i.e. helping members accomplish things, and where the impetus and direction is coming primarily from within the community (versus, say, some outside work, engineering, or consumer-related need).

The communities I’m imagining are probably connected with coaching or course offerings and will have small business (e.g. solopreneur) concerns related to marketing, attracting new members, avoiding churn, and the like. I get the feeling most Discourse communities are run by big organizations or technical products teams who are supporting their customers/users, which is great, don’t get me wrong – it means Discourse can continue to exist and evolve for us little guys!

Specifically I’m looking for community strategies and tactics to run with, that I can implement (uniquely?) on Discourse using its considerable feature set.

Anyway, I’d love to make contact with a few like-minded, similarly-situated Discourse community builders for mutual support and collab – and with folks who know Discourse inside and out who would be interested in facilitating this kind of use case. Thank you!

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Hi Tracy – I have built and run a number of CoPs on Discourse. Generally CoPs focus on one particular practice (e.g. Community Management) rather than practices in general. Having a laser focused use case (and therefore audience) is important.

You’ll hopefully be pleased to hear that this is a long way from accurate. There are many thousands of communities run by small orgs and individuals.

What kind of challenges are you struggling with specifically? I’m happy to help.

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@HAWK Thanks for replying! It’s good to know there is someone with lots of experience with this, and at the helm of Discourse! Very cool.

Excellent. Any suggestions for how to find such communities (whose admins might be open to giving me a tour and/or the benefit of their wisdom)? I spent a long while looking on https://discover.discourse.org/ and searching around here at the Meta community.

Interesting. It’s very possible I am not pursuing an orthodox version of CoP. I know of the Wenger-Trayners’ defining work, and most recently I’ve been following Rosie Sherry at rosie.land. But really I’m winging it for my own purposes, which don’t align exactly with either of those models.

Neither my use case nor audience are laser focused (yet), but I am definitely honing in on a certain type of person and approach to lifelong learning that I’m trying to enable and promote. (“Lifelong learning” can mean an awful lot of things. Who isn’t a “lifelong learner” these days!?)

One big struggle is finding (and onboarding, and learning to work with) good beta testers who can give constructive feedback – without derailing everything, or distracting me from progress. I’m frankly fearful, although a bit desperate for input at this point. I’m sure this isn’t an unusual mindset hurdle at this stage.

My Discourse set-up currently has a category devoted to “Practices,” which I am trying to keep simple but pack a lot of value into. I’ve decided to take a time-based approach to community “check-ins” with prompts designed to make reflection and member posts productive yet flexible, for gentle accountability. One specific struggle I’m having with Discourse is how to automate daily and weekly topic posting for community members to reply to. To keep it manageable I need flexibly configured automations, so I’m learning that plugin. But I’m running into quandaries right off the bat.

For example, I need to put dates in the topic title. It seems this is not possible (e.g. Inserting date/time into new topic's title field (ie, right here > !) - #11 by meave).

I also need to keep automated check-in topics in chronological order, which according to a long-standing debate here (that I don’t really understand), can only be done by adjusting creation dates and not by alpha-numeric sorting on titles.

Another consideration is how to prepare to bring new people (not just beta testers) into the community. I want to be both open and accessible but also selective (and go paid for members who will have access to everything – there needs to be financial support to make it viable). I’ve been following @Paul_King’s efforts on using automations for an application, approval, and group placement process (Alternative sign up pathways - #39 by tgustilo) for different kinds of members. Improved admin control over final group placement and profiles seems to be necessary.

I’m making good progress using the new docs plug-in for one category, and I’m thinking I’ll use a wiki for another category for members to crowd-source learning resources – ideally with subject-matter experts to moderate and edit submissions. I need to make all that user-friendly, which will mean providing quite a bit of training for would-be wiki contributors on how to use Discourse (how to submit a wiki post).

And in general, I’m worried about how to provide sufficient but not overwhelming onboarding for non-technical members, who are increasingly used to using other community software that is a lot less sophisticated, in how one navigates, posts, gains access, is granted permissions, etc. I’m pretty tech savvy (as a non-engineer) but it’s been a learning curve for me even as a member, much less an admin.

I’m still looking for the best way, as an admin, to review and test what members (of different groups, levels) see. I have yet to find the right discussion here on Meta to enlighten me on that. I’m not looking to “impersonate” an actual member but merely to see the community as a regular member, not an admin – ideally without having to create a number of test users and keep logging in and out.

There’s more, but that’s a lot! :crazy_face: Basically I’m working back and forth between many considerations at various levels, as I’m sure you can imagine: theoretical, technical, social, taking account of my own and others’ experience, trying to anticipate future members needs and delights. It’s a lot for one person, and I’m actively looking for community support myself. :slight_smile:

Again, thanks for chiming in. I’m excited to see what you might recommend.

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Hi Tracey, you are indeed grappling with all of the rich & complex challenges of running meaningful online community.

I fully concur with Hawk that purpose is a (the?) key foundational key pillar. A core group of people who deeply believe supports this on one side, and the platform (i.e. Discourse) holds ups the other.

I recommend that you spread your efforts across all three, and don’t get too hung up on the specifics of the platform - that can come in time.

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I think that Community of Practice is a typical use case for Discourse. Even if they don’t explicitly start out that way, tech forums, hobby forums, customer support forums, etc, tend to organically develop many of the characteristics of CoPs.

An exception to this is that forums also attract casual users. Answering those user’s questions allows the core of the community put their knowledge to use, so I don’t think the presence of casual users asking Q&A types of questions means that a community isn’t a Community of Practice.

I’m bringing this up to suggest that a lot of the functionality you need might be baked into Discourse. And also to suggest that Discourse is lacking documentation about configuration for common use cases.

Using this as an example, Discourse has a site setting that allows you to create a shared drafts category. It’s common to use the Staff category for shared drafts, but any category that a subset of your users have access to would make sense. Users with access to the category can collaboratively create and edit topic. These topics can be scheduled to be published to another category (generally a public category) at a specific date and time. This would be a good strategy for publishing daily and weekly topics that were designed for other community members to reply to.

It’s worth noting that Discourse also has a configurable notification system. You could make use of it by publishing check-in topics to a category that either all users, or a subset of users are “watching first post” by default. (Users can opt out of this if they choose.)

For just the above scenario, there are a fair number of details that I don’t think are immediately obvious to new admins of Discourse sites. For example: what are custom groups, how is group membership used to control category access and other permissions, how do you add users to a group, how does the notification system work, etc. The point I’m trying to make is that if something like Community of Practice was recognized as a typical use case for Discourse, it would be possible to document most of the relevant configuration options.

I’m partly replying here because my own use of forums has changed over the past year. When learning about a new subject, instead of going directly to a forum, I start by exploring the subject with the assistance of an LLM. This is efficient, but it has resulted in the creation of a private knowledge base instead of contributing to a shared knowledge base on a public forum. Essentially, I’ve replaced posting on forums with writing notes on a private note taking app.

Something that might fall under the label of Community of Practice would be to provide a space for knowledge synthesis. I think the default structure of forums has been to initiate discussions with a question. Possibly there could be a cultural shift where forums come to be seen as shared knowledge bases. It could be as typical to initiate a discussion by posting “what I learned about x” as it is to post “I’ve got a question about x”. This is speculative, but it might provide a strategy for how to get a new community off the ground - just give people a place to publish what they’ve learned.

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For both topics, I found it valuable to have a staging site with a copy of our forum available, which we use as a sandbox to experiment with new features and a safe place for future power users to experiment with Discourse without side effects and any email notifications. To keep it simple to log in there, we use Discourse Connect, with the main site as the Discourse Connect provider.

In our case, real progress in learning how to use discourse takes place much better, if people gather in real life to learn together.