Design tiers & building blocks: Static / Dynamic / Emergent...?
If you think of an OOC as a living system (like a body, a city, a building, etc.), then you get “tiers” to the design. In a body, the tiers could be something like (1) meat and bones, (2) the motion of blood and life, (3) and the magic of living, with everything that results from that.
For an OOC, the design tiers are maybe something like:
1 // Static (you can design these bits in advance, and it will sit there even if nothing is happening, like an empty city):
- Purpose & promise (who it’s for and what it does)
- Community home (the architecture without inhabitants)
- Heartbeat (the intention of weekly happenings)
2 // Dynamic (the life and activity of the static pieces, like the hustle and bustle of a city, some done by you directly, some simply enabled and encouraged):
- Core interaction and behaviors between members (i.e., sharing knowledge, feedback, questions, progress, etc.)
- Newsletter and email heartbeat
- Calendar of events
- The actual posts and pieces of content
- Wonderful people
- Spaces, topics, channels, conversations
3 // Emergent (the ephemeral magic that results from a living city, like art, culture, and friendships, and music):
- Connections and collaborations, partnerships and friendships
- Experiential knowledge (i.e., there are people here who have done the thing)
- Captured knowledge & resources (e.g., city library, local museum)
- Behavior change (good habits made, bad habits broken)
- Instilled communal culture and values (“people like us do things like this”)
Based on the above, a couple misc. thoughts:
“Control” over the first tier is almost absolute: you can decide/design in advance what everything will be. The second tier is more serendipitous, and the third is almost outside of your control (you can maybe only nudge it, indirectly, by adjusting the earlier tiers). A gardening metaphor might be that the first tier is laying the plot, the second is nurturing the plants, and the third is trusting that they’ll come together into a great soup. (“Trust the soup!”)
In terms of actually building an OOC, it means that although the second and third tiers absolutely do matter to a healthy, thriving OOC (in the same way that art and culture matter to a healthy, thriving city, and that fun and friendship matter to a healthy, thriving person), they aren’t necessarily something that you’re going to be able to pin down at launch day. Instead, it’s something that you observe and encourage as it all goes along. It’s maybe like a kid or a pet: at a certain point, you’re just watching and supporting what happens, not necessarily causing it.
Kind of a half-baked idea with fairly low confidence behind it, but better out than in ;)