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

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."