Community

Engineering, maintaining, organizing…

2020-02-02 – 2023-08-09
Maybe related 🤷:

Building community in the workshop

How to build local community, whatever that is. For the moment I think I am more interested in a subset of this question, which is designing movements which is about designing replicating communities with an end-goal.

Flagship community-building consultancy People and Company have a lot to say in this area. I have not read enough of their material to know how evidential it is, but they certainly pitch well. See the Get Together Book, podcast, resources site and substack, which package community building for the dotcom era. Their case study on substack, (especially since substack ultimately bought People and Company.1

An infographic-friendly presentation is Nick DeWilde’s The Social Architecture of Impactful Communities.

To motivate initial interactions, you’ll want to design your community to incentivize members with their first hit of value soon after they sign up. T his value should arrive in a form that fulfills whatever need caused them to join in the first place. For example, I recently joined a writing group called Compound that has a couple of great magic moments:

  1. When you initially join the Slack group, the founders invite you to introduce yourself and share your publication. This leads to warm welcomes, new Twitter followers, and newsletter subscribers (leveraging the dopamine hits that social platforms are good at delivering).
  2. During onboarding, the founders explain that the core activity of the group is editing. You post your work and get a bunch of insightful comments. The first time you post something to the group and end up with a Google doc full of insightful comments, you can feel the value that the community has to offer.When a community’s magic moment is effective, new members will crave more of this value. You want them to learn, early on, that the key to unlocking more value for themselves is to create it for others.

He also recommends

Friday for Future have a political-action-driven set of resources.

Center for Scientific Collaboration and Community Engagement studies this stuff, e.g. Woodley and Pratt (2020).

Image: CSCCE

They publish, e.g. Guides to community maintenance on slack.

Governance

See community governance.

References

Baldassarri, Delia, and Guy Grossman. 2013. “The Effect of Group Attachment and Social Position on Prosocial Behavior. Evidence from Lab-in-the-Field Experiments.” Edited by Angel Sánchez. PLoS ONE 8 (3): e58750.
Baron, Robert S. 2005. “So Right It’s Wrong: Groupthink and the Ubiquitous Nature of Polarized Group Decision Making.” In Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 37:219–53. Academic Press.
Bergh, Jeroen C J M van den, and John M Gowdy. 2009. “A Group Selection Perspective on Economic Behavior, Institutions and Organizations.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 72 (1): 1–20.
Bergstrom, Theodore C. 2002. “Evolution of Social Behavior: Individual and Group Selection.” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 16: 67–88.
Bowles, Samuel. 2001. “Individual Interactions, Group Conflicts, and the Evolution of Preferences.” Social Dynamics 155: 190.
Boyd, Robert, and Peter J. Richerson. 1992. “Punishment Allows the Evolution of Cooperation (or Anything Else) in Sizable Groups.” Ethology and Sociobiology 13 (3): 171–95.
Cheng, Joey T., Jessica L. Tracy, and Joseph Henrich. 2010. “Pride, Personality, and the Evolutionary Foundations of Human Social Status.” Evolution and Human Behavior 31 (5): 334–47.
Couzin, Iain D., Christos C. Ioannou, Güven Demirel, Thilo Gross, Colin J. Torney, Andrew Hartnett, Larissa Conradt, Simon A. Levin, and Naomi E. Leonard. 2011. “Uninformed Individuals Promote Democratic Consensus in Animal Groups.” Science 334 (6062): 1578–80.
Dunbar, Robin I M. 1993. “Coevolution of Neocortex Size, Group Size and Language in Humans.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16 (4): 681–94.
Henrich, Joseph, and Robert Boyd. 1998. “The Evolution of Conformist Transmission and the Emergence of Between-Group Differences.” Evolution and Human Behavior 19 (4): 215–41.
Horst, Ulrich, Alan Kirman, and Miriam Teschl. 2007. “Changing Identity: The Emergence of Social Groups.” Economics Working Paper 0078. Institute for Advanced Study, School of Social Science.
Klug, Michael, and James P. Bagrow. 2016. “Understanding the Group Dynamics and Success of Teams.” Royal Society Open Science 3 (4).
Maner, Jon K. 2017. “Dominance and Prestige: A Tale of Two Hierarchies.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 26 (6): 526–31.
Mäs, Michael, Andreas Flache, Károly Takács, and Karen A. Jehn. 2013. “In the Short Term We Divide, in the Long Term We Unite: Demographic Crisscrossing and the Effects of Faultlines on Subgroup Polarization.” Organization Science 24 (3): 716–36.
Nowak, Martin A. 2006. “Five Rules for the Evolution of Cooperation.” Science 314 (5805): 1560–63.
Olson, Mancur. 2009. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Vol. 124. Harvard University Press.
Post, Daniel J. van der, Mathias Franz, and Kevin N. Laland. 2016. “Skill Learning and the Evolution of Social Learning Mechanisms.” BMC Evolutionary Biology 16 (1): 166.
ScottHanson, Chris, and Kelly ScottHanson. 2005. The Cohousing Handbook: Building a Place for Community. Rev. ed. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers.
Trouche, Emmanuel, Emmanuel Sander, and Hugo Mercier. 2014. “Arguments, More Than Confidence, Explain the Good Performance of Reasoning Groups.” SSRN Scholarly Paper ID 2431710. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network.
Woodley, Lou, and Katie Pratt. 2020. “The CSCCE Community Participation Model – A Framework to Describe Member Engagement and Information Flow in STEM Communities,” August.

  1. For a critique of the limits of the Substack model, see How Substack Became Milquetoast.↩︎

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