What is the core idea of having sub-communities in an online community?
The ability to create isolated spaces that are at the same time interconnected into a single whole is one of the most critical features that a community platform must provide if you want to run a large community on it, because communities grow through dividing a larger community into sub-communities.
Any sub-community is a community in itself and, as a result, the dedicated sub-community space should provide users the ability to customize it. The more customization options for dedicated spaces the platform provides, the more effective the growth of sub-communities will be. Here is a minimum one needs to look for:
- Users should be able to define what is on-topic for the sub-community.
- There should be a place for meta–discussions dedicated only to the sub-community.
- There should be a possibility to have moderators for the sub-community.
Give the preference to a platform that will also provide sub-communities with:
- The ability to create their own help center, at least in some minimal form.
- Ability to customize the dedicated space visually.
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.