How many spaces for a new OOC? // Organic discovery vs. top-down design // Hall of doors, cluster of ghost towns

February 3, 2023 · ooc-design

My current beliefs about best practice space setup for a new-ish OOC:

start with the fewest possible spaces

When setting up a new community home (i.e., forum), the common mistake is to start with far too many discussion spaces divided into far too many little topics.

At launch, an OOC really doesn’t need (or want) too many forum spaces:

• One for discussion (two at a stretch)
• One for onboarding (“start here”; designed to drive them toward taking the first meaningful action)
• If relevant, a couple for organizing your own stuff (knowledgebase, events, etc.)

Early on, multiple discussion spaces must fight each other for critical mass, and it’ll end up feeling like a cluster of little ghost towns instead of a single healthy whole.

A members described the experience of this as:

Walking through a hallway full of closed doors, where you have to open each one to see what’s in there—and usually there’s nothing.

With lots of spaces, when members want to post something, they face a moment of friction and doubt, wondering whether they’re posting to the “right” place.

We indulge in creating loads of spaces, I think, as a reassuring sort of busywork: shuffling things about, organizing, and imagining what everything might eventually look like at scale, without dealing with the scary, all-important work of beginning to find and serve real members. (It’s like procrasti-cleaning, but for your OOC home instead of your home.)

Beyond the above issues (a cluster of ghost towns, hall of closed doors, friction to posting), there’s also the fact that you don’t even know what the right spaces are going to be—because your members haven’t shown you yet. 

desire paths / organic space design

Public spaces are designed with paths in very rational places, but people tend to find better routes. these unplanned, well-trod routes are called “desire paths.”

There’s a story of a clever university architect who didn’t put in any paths on a new campus, but instead laid grass everywhere, waiting to see where students walked, and then paving over the desire paths to formalize the emergent behavior. 

We can follow the same model for our earliest OOC discussion spaces:

1. Begin with as little structure as possible—a single discussion space (plus any non-discussion utility spaces)
2. As conversation levels grow above critical mass, “pave the desire paths” by creating a new space to support the strongest, most desirable emergent behavior you’ve observed
3. Give the new space an anti-ghost-town boost by going back through archives and moving all relevant discussions into their new, dedicated home
4. Observe and repeat from step 2

This leads to community homes that feel organic and progressively designed by the inhabitants (think medieval European cities) instead of artificial and designed all at once by some intelligentsia (think American suburbs). (This concept is via , with more detail in this comment and thread**.)

Example: fitness community begins with one discussion space. Before long, you notice members swapping detailed notes on extremely in-depth workout plans; that’s a desire path. If it’s something you want to embrace and encourage, and if you think enough people are into it to support critical mass in a new space, split it off and move over any historical conversations. 

other thoughts

• Muffling: sometimes, a members’ desire path is undesirable to the OOC’s goal at large. in that case, you can split it into a space with reduced notifications/visibility in order to muffle it from non-interested members without explicitly censoring or censuring. See: reframing moderation as signal vs. noise.
• Nouns vs. verbs: when we design spaces, top-down in advance, we tend to organize around nouns: topics, tags, etc. But in practice, some of the most powerful spaces are built around what people do there: the interaction, the activity, the verb. I don’t think this is possible in every scenario, but it seems strong when it happens, so worth staying open to. (Slightly more discussion in this comment.)
• Larger initial audience: if you’re starting with an existing audience rather than building up from scratch, then a single discussion space might be a little noisy, and you might decide for more than one. Still, I’d suggest erring on the side of too few rather than too many, since you can split spaces more easily (and productively) than you can collapse them.

What else?

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