Lean Communities

Minimum Viable Communities

Here’s a couple of ideas we’ve been finding useful recently.

We’ve noticed a spike in people asking us about helping them build online communities.

And there’s a couple of things to say about this.

Community Management Maturity Model

First, it’s always worth looking at the Community Management Roundtable’s Community Management Maturity Model.

Which is quite a mouthful. But, in essence, it’s this:

What it means is fairly simple.

You can’t ‘create’ a community. (Although you can, of course, design, create and build the technical architecture on which everything is based).

But there’s beginning to be enough in the way of good practice to give most people a fairly solid roadmap in terms of approach and development. There's a fairly well-trodden route to development. You’ll note, though, that the Community Management Maturity Model diagram is descriptive rather than a set of instructions. It’s a table that talks about ‘what happens in many cases’ rather than ‘how should we approach building a successful online community?’.

Minimum Viable Product

Secondly, an approach which fits in well with this is the idea of Minimum Viable Product (or Minimum Sexy Product as this Start-up Handbook author would have it).

Minimum Viable Product (or MVP, for short) is the idea that the best way to approach Product Management is to develop and release an MVP and then iterate on top of that - benefiting from the real feedback you get from real customers or users. AKA 'people'.

In some people’s heads, this might translate to ‘release something rough and make it better as you go along’. It sounds a bit flaky if you think of it like that.

In fact, it’s better translated as ‘release something that balances cool and simple, then use hardcore analytics and high-quality feedback coupled with Agile development processes to do something fabulous that people love’.

So, an updated version of the CMMT blended with MVP might look like this:

Minimum Sexy Communities and Drupal

From a technical / architecture perspective, we now have a fairly well-established toolkit to build and play with:

• Drupal (obviously)
• RESTful interface to the Social Networks
• Drupal Modules – e.g. Taxonomy, Flag, Achievements, Organic Groups, Notifications, User Notifications, Heartbeat,
• Drupal’s fine-grained approach to nodes and user roles
• Other stuff! (Sitestats and Analytics approach?)
• Open Calais and other tools to work with content
• Social Media plug-ins

In other words, we’ve got a toolkit for our MSC – a Minimum Sexy Community.

Further reading:

• Five Best Community Building Modules

• Community Building and Social Networking Modules

• Integrating Social Media Plug-ins into Drupal

• Even world leaders are using Drupal Commons!