"Forum" vs. "community"

December 28, 2022 · ooc-hey

I’ve been catching myself saying “community” when what I really mean to say is “forum.” It’s causing confusion within the team and sloppy thinking within myself.

The community is a *group of people making progress toward a shared goal. * The forum is… well, a forum. (Circle, in our case.) The forum is a place for Q&A, posts, discussion, and so on. It’s got a lot of potential benefits and is an important part of many communities, but isn’t the same thing as the community itself. Depending on the situation, a forum could be anything from essential to irrelevant.

So when I find myself saying, “This authors’ community is killing me,” I might actually mean:

• Recent forum activity has been noisy or off topic
• Writing group event attendance is down, and I’m not sure why
• I’m having trouble writing up the onboarding emails

(Or any number of other specific, solvable issues.)

Once specifically identified, all of the above feel fairly tractable. But when they’re all conflated under the single umbrella of “community,” it’s hard to know where to even start. And when I ask my team for help “on the community,” they’re understandably stumped as well. 

It’s also really liberating to be able to say, “the forum (or newsletters, events, or whatever else) is having some problems, but the rest of the community is going great.” 

Modern forum tools (like Circle) are busily engaging in a do-or-die positioning exercise, where they’re trying to convince us all that their tool and our communities are one and the same. It’s a billion dollar deception, and I fell for it. (You can see evidence of my mistake all throughout the early OOC manuscript, for example.)

Better language, better thinking, better action. That’s the idea, anyway ;). 

In my team, and for myself, I’m making an effort to say “forum” when I mean forum, “chat” when I mean chat, “events” when I mean events, and so on. 

And to only say “community” when I mean people.

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