Community-Building (and a warning about choosing Discord for online communities)

Here are some notes I have on community-building. I am coming at this from the perspective of someone who has started online communities, moderated additional communities, and lead both new and established in-person community organizations. I hope someone finds this helpful!

Clarifying The Term "Community"

When I refer to "a community" in this sense, I am referring to a specific space that attracts people around a common interest. The interest doesn't have to be what we may traditionally think of as an interest. For example, "living in the same neighborhood and wanting it not to be terrible," can be an interest. I'll probably lean slightly more towards talking about online communities here, because that is where we are currently talking, but most of this applies or can be altered to fit offline community dynamics.

Don't "Reinvent the Wheel"

One thing I think is really important in community-building is to not put too much effort into figuring out things which other communities have most certainly figured out before you. I think that is a huge mistake many new community leaders make. Use your resources!

For example, if your community is a Discord server, Discord itself has an entire section of their website devoted to helping you learn how to moderate better, and that's outside of their resources on the technical aspects. If your community is an activist community, check your local library resources, talk to people at research institutions who study these types of movements, and talk to activists in related areas on how they maintain their organizations. If you are starting or taking over leadership of a school extracurricular club, your school may have resources on how to make it better. My university has an entire department that will help with that, including with specific scenarios such as leadership transfers, declining membership, etc.

If you plan to start a local organization, look into whether you may be better served starting a branch of a regional, national, or international organization. Or perhaps you could work with a coalition of similar organizations. If that possibility exists, you already have framework and resources to start the organization, and there are likely people whose job role specifically includes helping people like you succeed.

The point is: Whatever you want to do, people have done this before. People naturally assemble in communities; they have done it for thousands of years, and for at least the past few centuries, they have often kept records while they have done so. Take advantage of that!

Also, don't just stick to frameworks and tools you know. Look into your options. For example, I see a lot of Discord servers that pop up these days for communities that I'm not sure are best served by Discord servers. I will elaborate on these cases under the cut.

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I hope you found this information interesting or helpful! If there is interest, I can work on assembling a list of resources for community-building. Let me know in the comments!