Community Subgroup
Group
Leads
Bijoy and Jon Lebkowsky
Description
For bootstrappers interested in building communities
What Makes a Vibrant Community?
- It’s about something (Maven). A vibrant community picks a knowledge niche and continually deepens and challenges its understanding of its niche.
- It takes action (Evangelist) and causes others to do so. The community evangelizes its knowledge niche and supports its members in taking individual and joint actions. Vibrant communities find ways to take collective action, both within and without their communities. Every community will have unique actions it can take.
- Its members are connected (Relater). A vibrant community actively nurtures the number AND quality of connections among its members. It moves from a "broadcast" mindset, with members interacting primarily with the central organization, to a Metcalfe and Reed mindset, creating ways for members to connect one-on-one and in groups, particularly in person.
- It creates and communicates protocols. Protocols help members understand appropriate (and more importantly, inappropriate) interactions within the community. They also provide for varying levels of engagement with the community and ways to escalate and de-escalate involvement. While protocols are created with the community's input, they are ultimately set by the leadership.
- It uses systems to support its activities. Generally systems include different technologies, particularly web-based ones.
- It bootstraps itself. The first 5 principles are applied in context, evolving in a step-wise fashion and impacting each other in nonlinear and unexpected ways. Communities go through analogous stages of development to ventures - Ideation, Valley of Death, Growth and Rebootstrap - and right actions are needed for each stage. Indeed, different parts of a community will be in different stages. Additionally, vibrant communities continually rebootstrap themselves and incorporate ways to create innovation, while scaling initiatives that have been proven to work.
Hear a talk on the six principles on the BootRap Podcast.
Links
Topic Subgroups: Sales, Open Source, Marketing, Personality, Usability