I’m currently facing the challenge to build up a citizen community to give the citizens the chance to talk to the city, the industry and the experts. The overall goal of the community supposed to be: make cities more liveable.
What would you need to be attracted by a online or offline Community?
First thing is welcome to our community @RocketMan!
I think the key thing to a community is having a solid foundation, some people who will kick the pebbles that form a landslide. The first impression someone has of a community is what they need to come back, and if there’s very few people the first time they show up, they feel like it’s too much pressure to be one of those founding members. It’s a bit of a catch-22, because if you have a critical mass of people, the community becomes self-sustaining and vibrant, but if you don’t have enough people, they don’t bother coming back. So you need enough people to attract more people in order to get people, around and around into madness (unless you can find those few people willing to put in the work to publicise it, or start with a staff core)
The other thing I’ve found with communities previously is that unless you constantly push it, it stagnates fast. Maintaining a community is high-touch, high-maintenance, and requires a ton of outreach and engagement, else you end up with a small core that just shows up and is intimidating to outsiders (if they even notice you exist)
@MHaton I think you’ve really hit the nail on the head here. Community takes real effort. I love the phrase, “kick the pebbles that form a landslide.”
Quiet interesting, and definitely brought it to the point of issue.
Thanks for that @MHaton - I try to make it in three steps. Maybe you have a opinion on that.
First I want to create a identity book, to show them different parts of the city and all different kind of groups within the city. The idea is that everybody sees how different the city is and it give the chance to start at a common point. Second I’m doing a one to three day kick-off. Here it is everybody is supposed to exchange, hear about the general idea of the citizen community and contribute. Third we have 4 weeks containing: Research, Problem Identification, Solution, Evaluation. And then fourth we bring all this thoughts into our Online Community.
So the first approach is knowledge sharing in this case.