Any social system has only two states. It either grows or dies. If you do not work on growing your community, it will begin to stagnate and then degrade. Running initiatives aimed at growth is the only way to keep a community healthy.
Topics covered in this chapter:
- How do online communities grow?
- What are the three critical growth points of an online community?
- What is the primary condition for an online community to grow?
- How to write posts about community initiatives that make users act?
- What are the most important tips and advice for writing initiatives for an online community?
- How to change the mission of an online community?
- What are the goals of an online community? How to create them?
- What is the core idea of having sub-communities in an online community?
- How to encourage users of an online community to volunteer and help grow the community?
- What is the simplest and scalable way to reward users for contribution to an online community?
- What is content moderation and what is community moderation?
- Why moderation of an online community should be done by the volunteers not by software?
- What is the rule of thumb about what should go into the help center of an online community?
- How to approach creation of rules in an online community?
- How to make a new rule that you want to add your community legit in the eyes of the users?
- What rules should be added to the help center?
- When should a community manager change old community rules?
- How to maintain the culture of welcomeness and kindness in an online community?
- How does everything get done in an online community?
- What is the first thing to do to activate the volunteers?
- What should an initiative proposal have to make users want to act?
- What does make an initiative that your proposed to be compelling for users to participate in?
- What should an initiative proposal have to be compelling for regular users of an online community?
- What should an initiative proposal have to be compelling for casual visitors of an online community?
- What should an initiative proposal have to be more compelling users of an online community?
- What are the common advice to make initiative proposal be more compelling users of an online community?
- What are the strongest activators that make people act?
- What is the common advice to make proposed initiatives in your online community more persuasive?
- What is the easiest way to connect users to one another in an online community?
- How to create opportunities for joint activities for users in an online community?
- How to build trusting relationships between users of an online community?
- What should a community manager do to find leaders among users in an online community?
- What should a community manager do to make users become volunteers?
- What is the minimum condition of the environment a community manager should create so that users want to become volunteers?
- What kind of initiatives a community manager should avoid when growing their online community?
- What is the most important thing to do right after wrapping up a successful initiative in an online community?
- What is the first thing a community manager should do if something goes wrong with an initiative in an online community?
- What is the basic advice on how a community manager can maintain trusting relationships with volunteers?
- What should a community manager do to optimize their work routines regards to volunteers?
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.