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!