Community - people and the relationships between them - is a product in itself. The value (sense of belonging, feeling of unity, etc) that the “consumers” (the users) get from the “product” (the community) usually lies outside the physical world. The goal of a community manager is to maximize this value. To do this, the community manager needs to properly configure three key components of the system: the mission, the tools, and the rules.
Topics covered in this chapter:
- What are the three most important parameters of a community as a product?
- How to define an antagonist of an online community?
- How to define the mission of an online community?
- What role does software play in online communities?
- What types of moderation tools should a community platform provide?
- Why does a community platform need to have many customizable parameters?
- What is synchronous and asynchronous communication?
- What does the term “three places” mean for an online community?
- Why backups and data dumps are essential for a community platform to provide?
- What is the culture of an online community and how to set up the initial one?
- What are the nuances one needs to pay attention to when working on the help center for an online community?
- How to write the “be-nice” (aka “code of conduct”) help center article?
- How to write the “on-topic” help center article?
- What should a help center of an online community contain besides on-topic and be nice policies?
This is a fragment of a draft of the book “Lessons Learned While Working On Stack Overflow”. Read the full book on kindle or the paperback version.