Phase 4: The Village
“Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.” – Will Rogers
After the hustle and bustle of the carnival, you arrive at the village. Things are calmer and more predictable. They have also slowed down. New people come, and old people leave in an expected, orderly fashion.
You have passed or are going to pass Dunbar’s number. Chunks of people in your community are completely unaware of each other. You have made a name and a space for yourself. Now is the time to form alliances and explore new territories while maintaining what you have built.
Setting the Stage
If you have reached this stage, your community has succeeded in making a name and carving out a space for itself. You must now shift your focus to forming alliances and exploring new territories while maintaining what you have built.
Maintaining your community
Let’s revisit the idea of communities being gardens.
A vibrant and colorful garden requires high levels of maintenance. This means regularly tending to its plants and flowers; periodically removing weeds, insects, and pests; and occasionally fending the wild animal that threatens to walk over and destroy everything.
Similarly, you should focus on improving the experience of participating in your community, reinforcing positive behaviors, and looking for the subtle winds of change that could turn into storms in the future.
Expanding your influence
As your community matures, you either have achieved the goal you initially set out to achieve or find yourself no longer captivated by that mission. In either case, there is a tangible sense of stagnation in your community. You must address this by introducing ideas of expansion and focusing on a different or a bigger goal.
Is there a way to play a more significant role in the ecosystem you are a part of? Is there something new on the horizon that you can participate in? In this stage of your community, the bonds among the members are strong enough to survive an update to or a complete change of your north star.
Time to Perform!
The village is a comfortable place to stay. It is also where most communities go and die. You must continue to fan curiosity and keep the explorer spirit alive.
Activity 20: Guarding the gates.
ℹ️ Approaching maintenance
Take a closer look at how your community moves.
If you have reached the village, the raw experience of participating in your community is validated. Now, you must refine the onboarding and offboarding process.
- Optimize your onboarding flow.
- A smooth onboarding flow encourages new members to become participants instead of spectators.
- Revisit your initiation rituals. Now that you have more resources, how can you improve this experience?
- Have a regular onboarding call weekly or fortnightly. Assign buddies to each new member to help them navigate the community. Or, personally reach out to new members and schedule a brief conversation.
- Optimize your offboarding flow.
- A smooth offboarding flow turns leaving members into assets for the community.
- How do you ensure that members leave on a good note?
- Be open to any feedback you receive from exiting members, and do your best to help them go wherever they want to go next. It may not benefit you immediately, but it will create goodwill with exiting members that will pay dividends in due time.
Activity 21: Get good at giving and receiving feedback.
Remember, community founders have incredible levels of influence and are held in high regard by the community members. As your community grows in this phase, most members view you as the village elder. Use this power wisely.
- Learn to give great feedback.
- Great feedback comes from a place of empathy and contributes to the other person’s growth. Remember, it is about what they did — never about who they are.
- Check your emotions before giving feedback. It is extra important to choose your words carefully since most people on the receiving end of feedback are subconsciously defensive to some extent. You want them to focus on what your say rather than the delivery of it.
- Be as objective as you can. This means highlighting anything that is out of the ordinary — good or bad. Backing your arguments with examples/instances is the most helpful thing you can do.
- Learn to take great feedback.
- When seeking feedback, it is vital to be clear about your intentions — do you want to know the truth, or are you just seeking approval?
- Don’t let having strong opinions about your work shut you from new or different ways to do things. The idea of feedback is to improve the quality of the end product, not make a judgment on your ideas or your working style.
- A good practice in communities is to set up anonymous polls within pods or teams, where anyone can come and voice their opinions or ideas. Then, the pod of team leads can bring these up with the community and initiate discussion if required.
Activity 22: How are things different from the early days?
ℹ️ Take stock of things
The people involved in any project grow with it as well. This usually happens in subtle shifts, but after a long time, it is easy to notice these shifts and discover the factors responsible for them.
- Notice what has changed.
- Since the community took off, what has changed in your external environment? What are some new things — ideas, tools, and technologies — that have come up?
- Internally, what were some unexpected consequences of the decisions your community made? These could be decisions around kicking members, doubling down on a particular bet, creating rituals, etc. For example, you may notice that the vibe of your community changes after highly visible people leave. Note the effect of such a change.
- Sometimes incentives can optimize for the wrong type of behavior. What are the explicit and implicit incentive structures in your community? What are some ways people have gamed this? What new rituals or processes have sprung up? Are any of them unhealthy or unproductive?
- Have a system to evaluate new ideas.
- Communities of this size come with their own set of pros and cons. What is something that your community is the best at? What is something that your community absolutely cannot do? Being aware of your constraints helps you evaluate new ideas — they might be great in general, but they could not be the most beneficial path of action for your community.
Activity 23: Host or coordinate community-wide events.
- This one is straightforward — digital communities are the closest to emulating the feeling of irl togetherness, but they still cannot replace the real thing.
- Coordinate an irl meetup for your community members who are open to the idea. This need not even be something on its own — a good idea is to meet or host a side event at any tentpole event in your ecosystem.
- For example, ETH Denver has become a popular event for many crypto communities to gather and meet irl for the first time. Explore attending similar events if all your members are in the same country or continent.
Common Roadblocks
The biggest roadblocks to your community’s progress are politics and stagnation.
As your community grows, so do the number of unofficial sub-groups that go on to sow the seeds of destruction. Identify the key members that disrupt your community’s harmony and try to address their behavior early on.
Obviously, mere disagreement or a difference of opinion does not equal disruption. But, individuals that behave in clannish ways or communicate unhealthily are undoubtedly disruptive. Make sure you deal with these individuals early on — either by assimilating them into your community or helping them find opportunities they are better suited for.
The next roadblock you shall face going forward is falling into the trap of indecisiveness as to what you should focus on. This can be individual as well as communal indecision. The reason behind such hesitation is mostly an outdated way of evaluating opportunities. A certain inertia comes with growth, and this must be dealt with head-on.
Conclusion
By now, the operations of your community are mostly locked down.
You have a rhythm to your social media strategy, you’re building in public/getting the broader public involved as much as you can (through virtual events, progress reports, and content), and you have a healthy atmosphere in your digital headquarters (which could be Google Workspace and Discord, or a bespoke mix of open source tools).
You have a list of rituals that make participation fun, and you have set processes that facilitate idea generation, constructive discussion, and active voting.
Congratulations!
Most communities that start don’t live to see this day. But in all communities, big and small, the stages outlined in the previous posts are somewhat common. Sure, the duration of each phase may vary greatly — some communities develop on a slow-burn over the years while others bubble up in weeks.
It also depends on your community’s focus. Are you trying to build or improve a product? Are you trying to provide some service? Is it primarily a space for people to discuss a niche interest? All this affects your trajectory and your growth. Also, it can change anytime!
The only thing to remember is that any community is like an evolving, living, breathing entity that changes with time.
This is a thoughtful comparison. As is with art, no one “finishes” or “perfects” a community. They simply abandon it.
Community building is the greatest art of the 21st century. This is because of two reasons — first is the development of communication technology, which makes discovering others with shared interests very quick.
Second is the breakdown in traditional community structures that has led to people increasingly finding themselves in their community of choice.
Artists, creators, and ideas have unparalleled pull today. It is imperative to take full advantage of this and improve the world.