Some things you can tidy up in your community

1yr ago

11 replies

Community debt is real. It is where you prioritize community activities that will later impact the community experience in the future in a negative way. Generally speaking, it prioritizes community scale over quality of growth. To reduce community debt think about the things you can proactively tidy up. Here are some ideas. - members - events - email lists - conversations - content - channels - processes - automation - values - community activities - onboarding - leaving/graduation - staff Smiling face with open mouth and cold sweat - tools - data - KPIs / metrics - volunteers - landing/marketing pages - rules & coc What else?

Replies

Justin Dorfman

Open Source Sustainer

All I have to say is I love Orbit. It makes my life so much easier. Thank you and the rest of the Orbit team!

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Josh Dzielak

Co-founder & CTO at Orbit

@jdorfman We love you!

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Rosie Sherry

I build, study and research communities

@jdorfman 💜

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Dawid Zamkowski

Founder of Friday Genius

Community building is similar to coding debt. If you are not engaged and write poor code - you'll pay for it in the future.

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Manoj Ranaweera

SkilledUp Life, Deal Lite & Techcelerate

We have a lot to improve at https://skilledup.life - free talent for tech startups. But just like any business, we do have priorities. But I am fully aware of the Community Debt. Even more important is Technical Debt. Thanks for the reminder @rosiesherry

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Rick Turoczy

Cofounder, PIE

It's kind of in here implicitly but to state it explicitly: documentation. We make any number of decisions and tweaks while in launch and/or clean up mode and then, six months later, have a difficult time remembering why we did what we did. Taking time to document reasoning and implementation in the heat of the moment is always helpful later by reminding us why we did what we did. And why we happened to think it was a good idea at the time 😅

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Rosie Sherry

I build, study and research communities

@turoczy yes, we've documenting is so important. It's why I love blogging in general. I have some ideas around this from a community perspective, will share soon!

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Rick Turoczy

Cofounder, PIE

@rosiesherry Awesome! Looking forward to it

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Yaroslaw Bagriy

Full-time side hustler

Super great list here @rosiesherry! Reducing community debt should be #1 priority for all communities. Better yet to build a community without any community debt. Always prioritize quality of growth.

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Jessie

On earth to contribute and create value.

These are great points! I'll add 2 things logistic wise: - An organized back end - Being more specific when assigning staff and especially volunteers can help. I feel it's important to make sure they focus on one things because internally it can be overwhelming when people are not assigned to focus tasks which can lead to the organization to suffer.

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TheBigK

Entrepreneur, Guitarist

I resonate with this. I took an even bolder step! I removed ~98% of the members from my community of 400,000+ members! I realised that there were several accounts that were once active; but went dead after a few years. I removed them. Then - I checked Google Analytics and database to see which of the discussions were generating traffic and which ones were keeping people engaged. I deleted all other discussions. Net result - 1. Almost no change in traffic 2. Better engagement with existing users. 3. Better feeling as a community owner / manager.

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