Books on community building

Comunidade
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In the post explaining “What do user trust levels do?” @codinghorror references the book ‘Communtiy building on the web’.

I just started reading it and found it very useful on a meta level. Sadly the examples used are grosly outdated as the book is from 2000. (geocities is used as a prima example of how a thriving community works :smiley: )

One nice other book I found myself is

The Art of Community Building by Jono Bacon

So I was wondering which books people like and found useful to learn the art of online community building.

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Create a "community management" category
2020: The Year in Review
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Richard Millington’s “Buzzing Communities” is hugely recommended :slightly_smiling:

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How to quantify the success of your community?
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Highly recommended. Includes plenty of references to go deeper on the topic.

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Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody” and “Cognitive Surplus” are both great reads (and are best read in that order). They’re primarily about self-forming communities, but that’s really a key ingredient to any community; some are just helped along more than others.

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@alefattorini mentioned one of my favorite books on the subject; consider this an extra :+1: for Buzzing Communities. @HAWK helps helm the companion community, Feverbee.

The following two personal suggestions (and favorites) are considered “dry” reading.

That, for someone like me, means “really insightful text requiring tenacity of the subject to digest in a gleeful hyperfocus”.

If you are into community management, these two books are engaging, no matter the diction.

Design To Thrive focuses on creating community culture. Cultivating Communities of Practice may entice intranet communities for corporations and those communities built around a subject with a lot of valuable user-driven information lasting beyond the community itself.

And, while this next suggestion and personal favorite is not a book on the subject of community management, it is highly relevant as a logical tangent.

How to manage yourself among a lot of users and staff.

It focuses on three general options when it comes to someone in your life you feel you can “do without” (air quotes). Choose one.

  1. Attempt to change the someone.
  2. :dealwithit:
  3. Place the someone out of your life, or at least knock them down the lower digits (ie, away from single digits) on your life’s priority list.

This is a very general summary that only teases by a glimmer to the wealth of personal and highly self-empowering info contained in the book.

Also, how to possibly understand situations involving “problem” users. Replace “you”: People can’t drive your community crazy if your community doesn’t give them the keys.

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Thanks for the book recommendations.

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There’s a single author I always come back to: Howard Rheingold.

His book The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier was published in 1993. Don’t let that stop you from reading it!

He wrote extensively about technology and online communities. I’ll recommend two articles:

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Another interesting book on the topic. It has an updated guide to the approach.

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Not really a book, but the presentation of Joel was pretty nice:

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This presentation references Clay Shirky’s A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy.
@codinghorror used this title to blog about Kuro5hin and the importance of moderation 11 years ago.

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Acabei de ver os resultados da busca por “comunidades online” da Amazon e, ao encontrar este tópico no Meta, percebi que as pessoas leem livros sobre construção de comunidades :upside_down_face:

Acredito que a prática real funcione tão bem quanto um bom livro: ao agir antes mesmo de ler, você adquire um conhecimento sutil que não pode ser descrito em palavras. Às vezes, você simplesmente sabe que deve fazer isso ou aquilo e que vai funcionar.

Ainda assim, sou um grande fã de livros e gostaria de agradecer a todos que compartilharam suas recomendações aqui.

Gostaria também de recomendar a leitura da série de posts do blog sobre casos de uso do Discourse e do artigo migrando de grupos do Facebook para o Discourse. Embora sejam, em sua maioria, materiais de marketing, há muitas coisas e ideias interessantes para extrair desses artigos.

Existem também comunidades online onde as pessoas compartilham principalmente suas experiências na construção de, bem, comunidades online (como a FeverBee), além de toda a categoria Community Building aqui no Meta. Não sei exatamente o porquê, mas intuitivamente sempre acreditei que ler sobre as experiências e fracassos de pessoas reais ensina muito mais e é mais diversificado do que ler sobre comunidades online em livros. Agora, como este tópico é bastante antigo e há pessoas que leram um ou mais livros, gostaria de fazer uma pergunta: os livros se mostraram úteis na prática para o seu trabalho em construção de comunidades? Estou pedindo um tipo de pós-mortem: reler esses livros e compartilhar suas impressões.

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Managing Online Forums: Everything You Need to Know to Create and Run Successful Community Discussion Boards by [Patrick O’Kee].

Other than the technical bits, i think the book will help us newbies learn how to manage our platforms without feeling like our heads are about to burst.

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