In 2022, there’s a lot of online social inertia. The pandemic, coupled with people being comfortable with platforms they’ve been on for over a decade, can make it difficult to bring together people in a community on a platform with which they may not be familiar.

This post shows how being intentional about community building can help people feel welcome, safe, and able to contribute. It explores three ways in which WAO has collaborated with Participate to do this:

  1. Being intentional about the kind of community we want to create / sustain by using a community canvas
  2. Creating an easy on-ramp to the community through a dedicated URL
  3. Encouraging new members to introduce themselves in an interesting way

These three approaches, coupled with some other community building strategies, means that our community now stands at over 200 members!

1. Community canvas

It’s easy to create a forum, a channel, or a room online. A few clicks and it’s done. What’s harder is to think about how people use it to interact with one another in a positive way.

Using a modified version of the community canvas (which will soon make its way to our Learn with WAO site) we spent some time with Mark Otter and Julie Keane from Participate. We considered the purpose of the community, its identity and the values participants share. What success looks like and the experience for community members. We discussed roles and rules, and of course governance and communication.

Not only does this surface any slight difference in opinion or assumptions, but it gives us something to discuss at the next community call, happening on March 29th. Please join us, and bring with your experience of positive governance!

2. On-ramp

The Participate platform uses long, unique URLs for everything from communities to resources. This is great for being able to specifically link to anything on the platform, but doesn’t result in an easy-to-give-out link for those who might be new to the community.

WAO has been sitting on the domain badges.community for a few years, and now we have the perfect opportunity to put it to good use! We discussed what an MVP of the site would need to do, and decided that it would just need to:

We’ve now launched the site, and so if you’ve got design experience please do suggest ways we can improve it via our GitHub repo!

3. Introductions

Most of the people who have joined the KBW community have introduced themselves. This is either because they followed the link on the introductory welcome message, or because an existing moderator messaged them and nudged them to do it.

The prompt asks new members to tell everyone “a little bit about why you’re here” as well as “a ‘weird’ tidbit or fact about you”. In the screenshot above, you can see Ben Wilkoff talking about his desk setup, as well as reflecting on the link between blockchain and Open Badges. Others have talked about dissecting sharks, pen-and-paper roleplaying games, and their love of cats!

Why not join us and introduce yourself?

Next steps

WAO and Participate aim for this community to be self-sustaining by the end of 2022. That means deputising moderators, ensuring that a governance model is in place, and establishing a regular rhythm of community calls. At that point, we’ll be able to step back and be regular participants and/or moderators.

If you have any questions about the KBW community, feel free to ask in the comments here, or (better yet!) join the community and start a new discussion.