Community Building: Topic challenge ideas thread

Question

Jon Ericson recently posted a Meta discussion about how boost the amount of questions on the site, and promote activity in topics that may otherwise receive only a small amount of attention. I've seen it utilized¹ on other² sites³ and it seems⁴ to do fairly well. Here's how it works:

• If you have an idea for a topic, add it as an answer below. Please use one topic per answer.
• Next week, I or a volunteer (henceforth known as "the organizer") selects one of the topics (highest voted) and writes up a new meta post introducing the challenge for the week. The topic will be associated with a specific tag or tag set so that we can count how many questions were asked.
• Anyone who wants to participate simply has to asks about the topic of the week and tag it with the appropriate tag.
• At the end of the challenge, the organizer posts an answer to the challenge with a count of how many questions were asked and anything else they feel like highlighting.
• The organizer picks a new topic and starts back on the second bullet.

Note: It's fine to ask a question you know the answer to, and posting your own question/answer is good.

You can add topics to this list at any time, and if(when) we run out, this challenge series ends.

Answer 1

COMPLETED

Non-digital communities.

We've said we support non-digital communities, but we have no questions. Let's start a series of questions related to this aspect of our site.

One example of a more focused "non-digital communities" theme is questions related to your neighborhood. Any community defined primarily by geographic area or physical proximity might qualify as a neighborhood. The term typically implies a residential area but could also refer to: stores in a particular section of a shopping mall; suites in an industrial complex housing different businesses/teams; people who work near each other in an office building; etc.

Another example is committees, clubs, etc. These might have officers who are in charge of aspects of the organization, or they might be consensus-driven organizations where all members have the same status and privileges.

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Chosen for the inaugural challenge.

Answer 2

COMPLETED

new-users has many questions about how to encourage a new user to conform to site policies. I think we can expand this tag to include questions about engaging new users, encouraging them to stick around, and not hammering them over the head with rules.

Answer 3

COMPLETED

Let's ask questions about transitions. No community is static; communities grow and shrink, become more or less active, etc. How do we keep them functional when this happens? How do we add some structure to a community that's now too large to run by consensus? How do we migrate a community from one platform to another? (That's not a technical question but a community one.) How do we respond to shrinking -- or even dying -- communities?

This isn't a tag but a general idea. We've had a couple questions in this space; I suspect there are more to be asked yet.

Answer 4

We might get some mileage out of questions about working with short-term/temporary communities. Anything from a one-day training, workshop or hackathon, to a several-months long cohort of classmates or co-workers.

I think these questions would tend to favor offline communities but by no means exclude online communities – MOOCs, kickstarter backers, etc.