Communities are a central component of our current (digital) society. All social media platforms ultimately rely on people finding common topics and exchanging ideas about them. A strong community gives one strength and flow. One is part of a greater whole, contributes something to the community, and gets something back. This is not surprising, as cliques, groups, clubs, and meetups were an important part of our social life long before Facebook and Co.
Learning Groups
Communities are increasingly important pillars in knowledge management and learning. Learning works better when you don’t have to blindly poke around the web or in a library, but find yourself in a group where all members are thinking about the same topics. This is also an old, proven principle. We’ve met in study groups for apprenticeship exams, high school diplomas, or other tests. Ideally, every school class functions as a learning group. Every online course builds on course participants exchanging ideas and supporting each other in the group.
And yet: in lifelong learning or learning on the job, one is often an individual learner. You have a topic you want to progress in. But ultimately, you’re alone with yourself and your learning goals. Unless you find a community of like-minded people here too. The aforementioned social media, e.g., LinkedIn, help with this. Or numerous communities that form around topics, software products, concepts, or methods. The newest trend, aka old wine in new bottles: learning in cohorts.
Community Questions
The community topic raises many questions:
- How do you create communities?
- How do you build and develop communities?
- How do you moderate communities?
- How do you find communities?
- How do you ensure that your own community is found?
While the latter are more cultural and marketing questions, the first question contains a clear technical aspect. It turns out that in 2021, technology is actually the smallest challenge. Here are three ways to set up a digital community with relatively little effort.
Social Media Platforms
The easiest way is through existing social media platforms that offer dedicated functions in which groups can organize and “meet”. Such functions include, for example:
- a group chat (synchronous) or a group forum (asynchronous)
- a shared photo and file storage
- a shared event calendar
- bilateral chat or messaging functions
- an overview of all group members
- Additional tools such as surveys, reactions, games, etc.
All these special group features also include dedicated group roles and rights. In the simplest case, there are group administrators and group members. In a slightly more complex case, you can define additional roles such as moderators, editors, or even read-only guests.
Many social media platforms offer these functions, here are three that I use myself and can recommend for starting a community.
WordPress
Here at the Publishing Blog, we of course also rely on WordPress for community building. This summer, we were able to help build a knowledge platform, the Publishing-Club. Technically, the decision for WordPress was quickly made for various reasons. The only question was: which plugins do you need to offer community functions in WP?
A quick Google search immediately provides the answer: BuddyPress. By far the most frequently used plugin for communities is easily and freely downloaded and activated. The most important group functions are already there.
Then it’s time for the technical details. Some essential functions are missing. So you look for more plugins and find them. But the search takes time, you have to experiment, often be creative, and add your own code. This way, the WordPress installation gets bigger, slower, and more complex.
We left this path quite quickly and turned to a solution that is actually based on BuddyPress. It’s called – attention, the name is only slightly different – BuddyBoss.
The developers of this paid plugin have already done all the expansion of BuddyPress and offer an absolutely complete and very good-looking solution for community functions in WordPress. There’s still quite a bit of configuration work to be done here as well. However, this is done in a very well-thought-out admin interface and with very good support at your side.
By the way: Simea, Michel, and Haeme report on our journey and experiences with BuddyBoss as part of a meetup (sic – see above) on Tuesday, December 7, 2021. You can register here.
Mighty Networks
A third way that many people take is to use dedicated community software. The most well-known representatives here are Slack or WhatsApp, which brings us back to Facebook, which, like WhatsApp and Instagram, belongs to the Meta group. These apps can typically also be installed on smartphones and thus offer a community an even stronger home than the web portal solutions mentioned above.
For those who don’t want to commit to a large corporation here, a look at Mightynetworks is recommended. I use this community platform for my engagement with the Zukunftbureau and I consider it a very successful, somewhat more intimate alternative to Slack.
While Slack is primarily a communication tool, Mightynetworks is more geared towards sharing know-how in communities. You can set up courses, build forums, and of course start discussion rounds. This is possible both in a dedicated mobile community app and via a community website.
Conclusion: the Technology is not the Challenge
Whatever technical path you choose: technology alone is not enough. With all the above possibilities, I would even claim that the technology is negligible. Much more energy should be invested in bringing the community to life, moderating it, and often steering it. Enabling others to experience the community feeling, the flow, the familiarity, the feeling of being at home.
