As many spaces as needed, as few as possible

February 23, 2022 · ooc-design

I’ve been thinking about how to divide and arrange your community home, which largely comes down to the spaces/channels/rooms.

Three guiding principles:

1. Create the smallest possible number of spaces
2. Ensure a place exists for every type of content that your members want to share
3. Use the spaces’ design, division, and settings to incentivize desirable behavior and disincentivize/contain less valuable stuff

The problem with too many spaces is that it becomes busywork to check them, as described by one of my members:

My biggest frustration with [most community homes] is that *they feel like a giant room full of filing cabinets, or a hall of windowless doors.*

Is there interesting stuff in there behind some of those doors? Sure, but it’s not very friendly to discoverability. 

And without turning on notifications (which overwhelm quickly), I can’t easily tell where activity is happening. —J.A.

Plus, if you fragment things too much, you risk confusing your members about where they’re supposed to put things (and turning individual spaces into miniature ghost towns).

. . .

However, you do need a space for everything. Not for every topic, but for every action that your members want to take. Many members, for example, will occasionally want to promote (or at least mention) their own blog posts or businesses. If you haven’t created a “right place” for that sort of thing, it will end up appearing in the wrong place as clutter.

Keeping a tidy community is like keeping a tidy house:

The essence of effective storage is this: designate a spot for every last thing you own. The reason every item must have a designated place is because the existence of an item without a home multiplies the chances that your space will become cluttered again.— Marie Kondo, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up

HOWEVER, this doesn’t mean that all spaces must be created equal. 

Many of your personal belongings live in a place that is out of sight (in the attic or garage, for example). 

By controlling notifications and homefeed priority on a per-space basis, you can do the same within your OOC, creating a natural home for non-core behaviors to exist without cluttering up the main living spaces. 

Here’s my current space setup. It looks like a lot, but only four of them need to be checked regularly (i.e., the first four in the middle cluster):

Note the variety of settings and purposes.

In theory, the knowledgebases will prevent common questions from being repeatedly asked. 

The tools & content space is pure containment, since although some people love quick link posts, many don’t. So this provides a place for those links (include the occasional self-promotional or off-topic link) without burdening the home feed.

. . . 

I’ve got a working theory that, unless defended, every successful community eventually becomes overtaken by marketers who want to sell shit to the other members. 

But they’ll only make the effort if they think they’re getting meaningful exposure. So by controlling the visibility (in the homefeed, notifications, adn email) of that sort of content, I believe that you can make the overall community an undesirable target for self-promoters.

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