When you see users who, due to the patterns of their participation, have little overlap with each other in the community, but who would be interested in getting to know each other, you need to create opportunities for these users to be engaged in a shared experience on the platform.
The simplest approach to organizing a shared experience is to impose time and place limits on some type of activities that the users are interested in for some period of time. The type of activities and the place do not really matter, the goal is to do something useful together.
Typical activities that encourage shared experience:
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Contests. The primary requirement is that the contests are interesting to the selected segment of users. Usually contests have a theme, clear rules for winning and a timing. You can use some branded swag as prizes.
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Seasonal events are activities dedicated to some widely recognized public holidays or any important dates for the users.
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Improvement activities. Any activities aimed at improving the structure and quality of content, identifying unfound violations of the rules, removing unnecessary content, creating missing content, and etc. All kinds of activities that users would like to do, but never got around to.
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Meta-discussions. Discussions about important aspects of the platform and the community that users care about and have personal opinions on.
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.