Description

New offline and online communities are likely to fail: it is not enough to build the platform and expect that a community will come. In the academic community vast knowledge has been accumulated about the key factors to succeed in engaging a community. However, a community manager who is faced with a pressing or complex engagement scenario may not find the time to consult references, especially if they are not already familiar with the underlying theory.

To address this concern, we assembled a catalogue of 59 distinct community engagement techniques (CETs) in both online and offline scenarios, starting with a systematic literature review of existing CET collections. Based on the catalogue we develop a set of method cards, tangible artefacts intended to support group processes. Used in a 15-minute sorting exercise, the cards can successfully support process innovation. We further validate the card set in a large-scale observational study of 20,000 Flickr groups, involving more than 1 million participants.

Are you failing to engage colleagues and peers in a complex project? Would you like to open a new community and don’t know why? Play the online version of our engagement game, build your own rules of engagement step by step, and download them in the form of a beautiful stack of cards.

Screenshots

Publications

• Community Engagement Triage: Lightweight Prompts for Systematic Reviews. CSCW. PDF