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.

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What’s your best advice for finding your core group?

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Thanks, Thomas. I did set up a test category to experiment with writing and post settings. Currently it’s for admins, but it could easily be a sandbox for all members.

I can certainly see where major structural experiments should launch in a staging site. For my tiny budget just getting started, that seems a bit like a nuclear option to have two separate sites tied together by common login (and maybe beyond my technical competence to maintain). But that’s a good idea to keep in mind for the future.

Thank you.

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Thank you @simon for so many thoughtful suggestions!

I agree. The Meta community here is an excellent example of this.

Discourse is surprisingly complex and configurable. It is lacking in advice on how to configure and prioritize which features are best for common uses. Technical documentation (and troubleshooting) is excellent, but it really is a challenge to figure out where to find and how to tweak which settings, or what is in Core vs plugins, theme components – or would require a custom theme or other coding. After a couple months I’m starting to get a feel for where to find certain kinds of things, but I still don’t always have the best idea of which Discourse features would work best for which member behaviors. As you say, this is a good example:

I have experimented with schedule posts and using Meta as an example I’ve explored docs vs wiki categories. I have a sense of how groups and security permissions work with categories and sub-categories. That could be a good idea (once I have enough active members) to let smaller groups or subsets of the community work collaboratively on daily or weekly topics for members to reply to: delegating versus automating. I like that idea. For now, it’s just me, and I have to remember to post daily and weekly. Even with an automation to create topics I have to go in manually and adjust the titles for the date and make any other adjustments to otherwise templated/generic prompts.

I haven’t explored notifications yet. I didn’t realize it was possible to set “watching” on a category (in effect). Filters on topic lists (latest, new, unread – it’s not always clear to me what the difference between these is) is also something I need to master. – Along with how to configure and customize for members (vs my admin view). Here is another reason I really need to be able to see what a generic member would see to check default views. Thanks for the tip.

Amen to that!

This kind of documentation would be gold!

It would help 1) understand best practices for CoPs; and 2) how each should be implemented in Discourse. I would flounder around a lot less – and likely inflict far less pain on my members as they endure my experiments. It might mean the difference between creating a successful community or having it fail.

This! This is a next level observation. :fire:

And continuing to the rest of what you wrote about shifting the purpose of forums from Q&A to initiating discussions with “what I’ve learned” and towards knowledge synthesis. One of the reasons I did end up with Discourse was its emphasis not only on quality of discussion (“civilized discourse construction kit”!) but also on AI. Best case scenario for what is constructed over time is a knowledge base – but it’s emergent over time, and dated, non-evergreen content needs to degrade gracefully over time. This is not a task that human moderators are going to want to (or be able to) perform over years. AI should be a help not only to private learners pre-forum, but also as the forum itself grows with the kind of knowledge sharing you envision.

One of my central motivations to focus on practice in lifelong learning is indeed to enable and assist members to work on their own PKM (personal knowledge management) systems. You’ve suggested, via LLMs and AI, a possible way to connect a learning community on the output end. PKM devotees can tend to be knowledge hoarders, rather than sharers or builders, and I think our cultural (economic, political, social) situation really needs reform in the direction of “ordinary” people not only continuing with lifelong self-education (as autodidacts) for themselves, but for the sake of a wider cultural shift to more participation by everyone. If a democratic way of life is to survive, well-educated generalists and lay specialists are needed to counterbalance so many entrenched technocracies and increasing inequality not only in wealth but in access and voice, I don’t think we’re going to survive the Anthropocene otherwise – or not well.

Sorry, that was a lot. :sweat_smile: But the stakes are high.

I would love to continue this conversation on both philosophical and practical levels. Thank you!

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There are a number of CoPs on Discover:
https://community.naturephotographers.network/
https://forums.yoyoexpert.com/
https://intfiction.org/
https://forum.trustedhousesitters.com/
https://t-nation.com/
https://www.elitefourum.com/
https://community.cartalk.com/
https://forum.artofmemory.com/
https://forum.psaudio.com/ and the list goes on.

This is a traditional model. That text is assuming that the “practice” that people are coming together to discuss is the same for everyone in the group e.g. they are all there to discuss their interest in photography.

Can you explain why? What problem are you trying to solve?

The discobot tutorial and new user tips are designed to do most of this heavy lifting. Have you run through those tutorials as a new test user?

Creating test users in each of the groups and then impersonating them is the best way to do it. Or just create one test user in a different browser and change their permissions to reflect different groups.

There are a few community building communities out there. Read widely at feverbee.com and https://www.cmxhub.com/. There is also commchathq.slack.com (let me know if you want and invite).

See How To Find Your Community’s First Members | FeverBee. Generally they are already part of your “audience” elsewhere.

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Thank you for all the resources! I am checking them out.

I’ve requested to join CMX. It looks like I do need an invite for Community Club.

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An automation helpfully adds a topic each weekday. I have to manually adjust the title. So far it’s just me checking in daily with a reply. The topics are in correct (reverse) date order. I’ve set the sort by created date.

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Not sure if there is a setting to do this, though it might be an interesting category option - particularly for this and similar use cases like journals.

At the very least these listings can be done via URL query.

Depending on which order you want, you could add this query to the end of your category string, and then share or display that URL with users in some way such as Topic List Sidebars

?order=created&ascending=true

?order=created&ascending=false

For example, here is the community section here at meta, but sorted from the first created topic to the most recently created:

https://meta.discourse.org/c/community/65/?order=created&ascending=true
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Ah, so you’re saying I can create a custom url to display a list of topics virtually however I want, and then create a custom menu somewhere with that link, for example using the theme component Topic List Sidebars?

Is there are reference for how to build these urls in general?

Thanks. I can see how understanding this will be helpful to get past any limitations in settings.

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