What is community life cycle? How does it look for an online community?
Community, as a group of people, has its own lifecycle. In theory developed by Bruce Tuckman any group goes through four stages: forming, storming, norming and performing. In case of online communities we can say that there are four similar periods of a community life cycle:
- Inception (forming). This is when the members of a community discuss and agree on the fundamental rules of the site.
- Growth (storming and norming). With every new user in the community the number of possible connections grows with a power of two. This leads to social tension and the need for new rules (storming). At some point, the community finds its best practices to approach most common social situations and new types of conflicts become rare.
- Maturity (performing). If the community mission and goals, as well as software the community is run on, do not evolve, the community reaches a plateau. The focus changes to community maintenance and community management.
- Death.
Almost any community grows the same way: growing from a few people to a few dozen people in one group then splitting the group into a few sub groups of a few people and then growing each sub group to the size of a few dozen. Then split and repeat.
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.