Thoughts on Community Engagement Design

Community engagement is not easy.

It’s hard to get people to show up, harder to keep them stay involved. It’s hard to build authentic relationship, harder to build reciprocal one. It’s hard to facilitate two-way communication, harder to facilitate inclusive one. It’s hard to engage diversely, harder to do so representatively. It’s hard to establish well-organized engagement process, harder to establish adaptive one. It’s hard to balance between continuous experience and limited resource, even harder to do between demonstrating value and maintaining momentum.

I’m not even experienced in community engagement, despite the fact that I was involved in such effort in the past.

As an outsider, I see a lot of similarities between community engagement design and game design.

With zero stake, I’m sharing my personal takes on community engagement design.

And it’s ICI (French pun intended) –

• Interactive
• Curated
• Ideological

Interactive

• Design stakes into user action. Things with little stake are things optional. Zero-stake, no-pressure casual games are popular, but they’re not sticky. Stakes can be designed according to the vision of the community. And each community might have very different visions.
• Create mechanisms to address the social cost of engagement. Not everyone is willing to let their bosses or interested parties see what exactly they say or do. Balance features between named and anonymity requirements. Variety sometimes help.
• Build multi-channel engagement ecosystem. Community is like TARDIS in Doctor Who – it’s bigger on the inside. Website is only one of many channels for engagement. People being engaged in a community is the culmination of a much larger effort than what’s being done to the community itself, in the same sense that behind a feature-length film there are thousands of staff working off the screen rather than on-screen.

Curated

• Curated content. The proven easy albeit labour-intensive way to attract people is to create quality content. Content production needs to be consdered seriously and budgeted accordingly.
• Curated interactions. Conversations don’t just happen, they are facilitated. Activities don’t just happen, they’re designed. The design of conversations and activities are scoped by the vision of the community: what we want people to think, feel, say, and do in a community? (Empathy mapping + service design)
• Curated triggers. Asking good questions is only one of many ways to trigger interactions. So is: having a radical idea, raising a debatable point, creating thought leadership through newsletter, events, publications, etc. Those are highly intellectual efforts that can’t and shouldn’t rely solely on the community builders themselves (hence: bazaar, not cathedral).

Ideological

• [[Bazaar over cathedral]]. How a community is organized and operated matters a lot for people to identify which stakes they choose to take. The cathedral approach centralizes all the stakes to the community builder, while the bazaar approach decentralizes the stakes among the coalition of the willing. We can learn a lot from the open source movement as well as the creative commons movement.
•  Idea-driven over topic-driven. “AI will kill us” is an idea and AI doomers form communities. “AI is the future” is an idea and AI boomers form communities. But “AI” is just a topic and there’s no “AI community”.
• Roleplaying over sightseeing. Organization is the mobilization of bias. The sense of community comes partially from being able to identify one’s role in it. And that role-identifying process only comes with identity politics (in its broadest sense rather than a narrow negative one) and with ideals people can resonate with (idea-driven).

What challenges do you have in community engagement design?

What kind of community do you want to build?

How are you approaching it?