What is the primary condition for an online community to grow?

An online community is able to grow only if all activities in the community are carried out by the users.

Community manager is an enabler, their primary task is to help users find interesting activities on the platform and do everything possible to ensure that the users have everything needed to complete the activities successfully.

When you are launching an initiative, you may need to do some activities yourself at the beginning, if you cannot find volunteers beforehand. At the same time, you will be able to launch another initiative only if all current ones are carried out completely by volunteers, that is, without your participation.

The more active users who help keep the community alive and growing there are in the community, the more advanced the community will be.


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.