Community about running communities?

[vriddy]

I'm meeting more and more people who are finding their way to Dreamwidth and enjoying the pace and atmosphere here better, and are also realising that if they want to see more activity related to their fandoms, they'll have to create the communities themselves.

And so I find myself wondering... Is there a community out there about how to run a dreamwidth community effectively? Where people share their experience and advice, best practices, and possibly support? With topics like how to write a code of conduct or a good profile page, keeping a community active, dealing with trolls, promoting a comm, encouragements...

I found a few posts under the communities tag helpful already, but the kind of questions I'm thinking of may have a broader scope than just getting started 🤔

Comments

[melannen]

This is a good place to ask questions!

fictional_fans is a sandbox community for fans who want to learn about communities - mostly so that people can get comfortable posting to and participating in them, but we would also welcome questions from people who want to try running fandom-y communities in particular. (We welcome any kind of post that are even a little bit fandom-related there.)

Honestly if you ask about the best way to run one you will probably get an argument, but that's why threaded comments are useful!

[vriddy]

Oh that is good to know, thank you!! I wouldn't expect it to be a Best Way, no 😂 but hearing about what people found worked well in their own communities would be really neat. Thank you for the pointer, I had already joined and you can expect to see more of me around :D

[melannen]

Well then, take that as a piece of advice to rec your comm wherever you see a chance. ;)

I would love a comm like that - allthemodcons is just begging to be claimed - but some of the lessons I have learned about running DW comms (which other people would argue me on) are:

1. Don't start one unless you have a pretty good core group of people already enthusiastic about participating;
2. Don' t start one unless you are willing to put in a fair amount of time, at least at first, to keeping discussions moving and actively recruiting new members;
3. DW is small enough that comms need to cast a really broad umbrella to be self-sustaining. Is "people interested in talking about modding" a big enough group? I don't know. I feel like it could be! Or it might be something that would work better as a sideline in a comm like this or f_f.

[vriddy]

Advice in action, I like it 😂 If you hadn't suggested a community where I can ask comm questions, I might have started one in a "blind leading the blind" kind of way. Mostly to give a bit of courage to myself and the couple of the other lost souls I see wanting to make Dreamwidth into more of a home... though having people with actual answers joining would have been nice, too! If you wanted to give it a shot I would be happy to join and help mod with my absolute lack of knowledge but decent amount of enthusiasm for encouraging people to be the change they want to see on Dreamwidth/start their own comms :P But I'm not sure if that's enough of a core or if there's enough of an audience, and for my current purposes of starting a fandom community I think maybe fictional_fans will be amazing :) I'm preparing a post about the code of conduct/community guidelines stuff I'm struggling with right now.

I don't have a core group of people for the community I will create (I want to find them!!) but have noticed whispers of "wouldn't it be nice" in comments and entries, in the corners of challenges like snowflake_challenge or in my own journal. It's for a popular series (BNHA) but the fandom skews younger I think, and so the majority of people are on Tumblr, Twitter and Discord. I think there should enough of us hiding on Dreamwidth to have a good time, though! Just have to create a cosy welcoming space and then let people know about it... somehow.

I'm also looking at and learning from younger comms like c_ent that seem to be doing very well in generating regular activity.

[jjhunter]

I would second melannen's rec of fictional_fans as a place where you can ask questions and (once it exists) advertise your new comm. Creating promotional materials like a simple banner and one sentence description of the community with an html box for the code that other people can copy & paste for reposting also helps. If you're already noticing whispers of wanting, you can likely find a small handful of people willing to try it out, and honestly, that can be enough to start - you can build a core with them.

From my own experience, hosting regular events or activities can be very helpful for building community and giving lots of entry points for people to join wherever they might be coming from. Think about what they might be looking for, and what you can do as a mod, as a community space host, to help facilitate that.

For a fandom-specific community like the BNHA-specific one you're thinking of, are folks looking for a place to talk about the most recent manga chapter and/or tv episode? Are they looking for (or open to) discussion posts for rewatching or reading canon from the start? (Having someone liveblog their reactions or thoughts to earlier installments can be amazing discussion-bait - there's a vicarious pleasure in revisiting it from someone else's perspective.) A place to advertise recent fic updates? Roundups of links for related recs from the last month / week? (I know on LJ there used to be fandom-specific newsletter and fic rec communities much like the current excellent multifandom Rec Center email newsletter.)

I would recommend checking in periodically to ask your members for feedback, and lean into whatever people are particularly interested in that also works for you. Especially when a comm is new, comment on every post if you can - comments feed people's sense of engagement and their willingness to come back and participate more. Think about what pacing of community activity is sustainable for you, and whether you want to be the sole mod or eventually recruit one or more co-mods.

Hope you have fun with it! Sounds like you're taking the time to get it set up well, and it's a fandom with sustained interest. DW is definitely a great place for building a cozy welcoming community - and it has particularly good moderation tools compared to those other three platforms you mentioned.

[vriddy]

Oh, a banner...! Promotional code people can copy-and-paste easily is a really good idea.

Thank you for the topic ideas. Several people have suggested regularly occurring posts to me and it seems like a good way to get a community started and keep activity going, especially at the start. I hope I can recruit co-mods to help, once things get going and I can find other people who want to create a community with the same kind of vibes :) Asking for regular feedback and focusing on what works both for the community and for me/the mods sounds like a good plan as well.

Thank you for the advice, encouragements, and excellent food for thought!!

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

I agree that it's very helpful to have at least a few friends who will help launch a community. However, there are different kinds of communities, and they don't all need the same thing.

* Communities based primarily on information. Icons, book or movie reviews, instructions, prompt lists, etc. remain usable even if the community is low-traffic or dormant. You don't need as many people to start one of these or keep it going, because the content has a long shelf-life.

* Communities based primarily on social interaction. Advice, Q&A, friending, news, lounge, etc. rely on having enough people to keep conversations going and respond to questions promptly and effectively. You need a lot more people to make them work well.

While "how to start/run a community on Dreamwidth" would certainly benefit from a larger membership, I think it would be very useful to have if it just turned up when people searched for that kind of information. They could read the instruction posts and find useful tips like the ones you just listed. One determined person could create such a resource, or better yet, a handful of people who run different types of communities could contribute different perspectives. "How to Run a Creative Bingo Community," "How to Run a Review / Recommendation Community," "How to Run a Social / Lounge Community," "How to Run a Challenge / Exchange / Swap Community," etc. would all be helpful specific posts along with general things like "How to Start a Community" or "Firefighting for Moderators: How to Put Out Flamewars."

Yes ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

I agree that a post on starting and maintaining Dreamwidth communities would be valuable. I haven't seen one on that topic. I'd be interested in participating if there was one, since I've got two communities -- allbingo and crowdfunding -- that give me useful background experience. A how-to community would probably improve the number and success of Dreamwidth communities. At least, it'd give us somewhere to point and say, "Try here," when we heard about someone wanting to start a community or having hassles with a current one.