Patterns for Better Online Community

1. TL;DR

We’re a squad of social and technical builders seeking better community online. Our mission is to gather the already present creativity of web3 projects, DAOs, and offline communities by focusing on themes such as culture-building, tooling, governance, and work practices. This knowledge will be curated and shared as a library of patterns and best practices for community-building online.

2. More Details

We will source wisdom from people who helped build strong digital communities, IRL communities, as well as perennial resources and our own experiences working in a variety of communal contexts. We’re excited to talk to community builders from the following projects and many others. If you're in one of these communities or know someone we might like to talk to, we’d love to connect.

Gitcoin, Optimism, Common Agency, FWB, Greenpill, Exquisite Land, Fractal Collective, Metalabel, Boys Club, Kernel, Enspiral, Seed Club, DEF, Cabin DAO, Discord, RabbitHole, Traditional Dream Factory, Vibecamp, Right Use of Power Institute, and more.

Themes we intend to explore:

• Culture-Building Practices - what practices, rituals, and incentive design support us? What social and technical design fosters a genuine sense of belonging, ownership, and enthusiasm?
• Tooling, Platforms & Bots - what tools and infrastructure support genuine collaboration and connection?
• Onboarding User Journeys - what experience design helps members become richly engaged and regularly contributing? What reduces friction, confusion, and drop-off rates?
• Governance & Power Distribution - what are effective ways of sharing and distributing power and decision-making? How do we prevent bad actors and behaviors?
• Conflict Resolution - how can we navigate conflict effectively?
• Collective Work Practices - what are the simple, non-bureaucratic processes that help groups perform tasks, work together and share success?
• best practices from IRL community building into the digital space to make it more human.
• Making the Digital More Human - what are the best practices from IRL community building that we can bring online to make digital spaces feel more human and cozy?
• Marketing - what marketing approaches help grow our communities?

The format of our public good takes inspiration from Christopher Alexander, Hillside Group, & Richard Bartlett. Each pattern contains an explanation, practical steps to implement it, and examples. There will also be an invitation for readers to contribute their own patterns.

We intend to create a resource that addresses many of the challenges currently facing community managers, leaders, DAOs, volunteers, open-source developers, marketers, and activists within the larger web3 ecosystem. If we can improve the experience of being a member of the many servers that comprise our larger collective, more people will stay present, contribute, and build the futures we know are possible.

3. The Need for this Project

How many of us have dozens of Discord servers that we never look at? How many of us are aware of countless projects that we’d love to get involved in, but have forgotten about?

We are living in a time where loneliness, mental health challenges, and a lack of meaning are more prevalent than ever. Healthy, thriving community with shared purpose and genuine connection is a crucial answer of many to the myriad of problems we face collectively.

Many inspired groups are asking what the new era of social media and online community will look like? As web2 social media platforms are becoming more and more saturated with non-human generated content and users, it’s likely more and more people will find solace in private digital spaces, the most dominant of which being Discord.

Community organizers turn to Discord because it’s where online communities are. But starting a server doesn't form a community. Online spaces require care and nurturing just like their physical counterparts. How is space shared? Where are the thoughts stored? How do we know what to focus on and what is important?

We see the need for a guide on doing it better: practical, shared wisdom curated from those doing it well in a digestible format for those seeking to connect us together.

4. Team

Each of us has devoted much of our professional and personal lives to exploring vibrant community. From hosting weekly potlucks to running coworking spaces and meetups to co-living: we’ve learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t.

For the past half year, Savannah has been tracking both the points of friction and thoughtful design elements of the communities she’s exploring to inform how she intends to run the DAO she’s building. Over time this research formalized into its own project as Chris and Jon joined in to try and work towards a shareable artifact.

Savannah Kruger: Founder What Sex Can Be, director at Impact Hub Boulder, facilitator at Harvard, organizer at TheoryU + MIT, Boulder Startup Week, living in cohousing and neighborhood building.

Jon Bo: Co-builder Exquisite Land, Gathern with Relational, Daily Jam, co-host Def Con, Interhackt, Tools for Thought CDMX 2021. Writer and adventurer at jon.bo.

Chris Viéville: Community caretaker focused on bringing people together in the digital world as well as the real. Passionate about tech, entrepreneurship, and gaming.

5. Objectives

Objective 1: Collect knowledge from community-builders and participants.

1. We interview community managers to further understand the nuances of their current community-related challenges to inform what solutions we seek.
2. We interview community leaders throughout the web3 space and collect their best practices, mindsets, and experiences as well as the community-centric challenges they’re grappling with. We make a point to ask different community leaders how they would problem-solve the challenges other leaders are experiencing.
3. We interview people participating in the web3 space on when they felt belonging, effectively onboarded, a genuine sense of community. We’ll then seek to identify what community design choices contributed to their positive experiences and reverse engineer what they experienced and record insights as potential inspiration for community design patterns in the library.

Objective 2. Support a group of community managers to run experiments to improve their communities.

1. We bring together a group of community managers who want to improve their community design. We support them in running small experiments based on the best practices we’ve gathered.
2. We collect the quantitative and qualitative results of the cohort.

Objective 3. Publish and share the curated library.

1. We gather our findings and share them as a webpage and PDF.
2. We share the library with all parties who contributed and participated in its creation and invite them to share it with their communities and audiences.

6. Funding

Gitcoin funds will be used to produce the media library. Specifically, money will flow to:

• Our team in compensation for time spent on interviewing community leaders, compiling information, designing + developing the library, and marketing
• Contract artist to design the front-end experience
• Collaboration tooling and infrastructure costs (Zoom, Notion, Figma, domain, hosting)

7. Timeline and Deliverables

Timeline: About 6 months

• About 1.5 months to continue interviewing and harvesting best practices from seasoned community builders.
• About 3 months to support a cohort of community managers in implementing small experiments to test best practices.
• About 1.5 months to compile the validated best practices and present them in a well-designed, easy-to-navigate digital library

8. Ways to Support & Get Involved

1. Contribute to our project here on Gitcoin
2. Share this project with your communities
3. Reach out to share any insights and best practices that you’ve gleaned. If you know of individuals or groups that are doing community really well, we’d love to hear about them and get an introduction if possible.
4. Reach out if you’d like to be one of the testing communities.