Community Team [archive]

This group has a practical focus. we’ll be working on

  • Site Administration
  • Software Development
  • Relationship between the community and the co-op membership

Each of these items touches on some broader themes, however the focus in this group will be on the pointy end of things where we’ll be changing some settings, writing some code and helping to run things on the community

Where we work

There’s three main places where we’ll work

  • Community Category . Posing ideas and developing and executing plans.
  • Weekly video calls: project overviews and check-ins.
  • Github: development work

Our Current Agenda

  1. Forum visibility and UX. How people come across the forum and how they engage with content on the forum.

  2. Forum Design and Development. What the forum looks like and its features

  3. Category and Group management. Arrangement and continued use of categories and groups in the forum to achieve our goals.

  4. Diversity. The diversity of the forum and how it interacts with the diversity of the cooperative.

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@boopboop @brndnkng @sganesh @Hakanto Hey guys, just to get this moving, let’s schedule in our first call for next week at 2021-09-15T01:00:00Z2021-09-15T02:00:00Z. We can potentially change that if it really doesn’t work, but let’s set it as that for now.

In between now and then, here’s a longer description of what we’re going to be doing here.

Overview

This group will have a practical focus. As mentioned in the OP (“Original Post” in a topic, i.e. my first message), we’ll be working on

  • Site Administration
  • Software Development
  • Relationship between the community and the co-op membership

Each of these items touches on some broader themes, however the focus in this group will be on the pointy end of things where we’ll be changing some settings, writing some code and helping to run things on the community

On the terminology of “Community” v “Forum”, we’ll use “Community” as our work may sometimes go beyond the bounds of the Discourse Forum per se, onto other community software platforms. For now it’ll be focused on the Discourse Forum.

Where we will work

There’s three main places where we’ll work

  • In the Resonate Community Forum category. This is for

    • Posing ideas
    • Developing plans
    • General discussion
  • In our weekly (or fornightly, or monthly, depending on what we decide) meetings. These serve as a “check-in”, i.e. to touch base on what’s going on, to keep a sense of momentum about what we’re doing here, and to deal with any issues or questions in realtime

  • In github, for community-related development efforts, for example Disocurse themes and plugins, or identity services (i.e. the ID server will be relevant to community deveopment).

How much work will be involved?

This is relative to how much time you have, and what our tasklist looks like. We’ll be looking to set a clear community work agenda here. That will give you a sene of what work needs to be done, and how you can best spend your time to contribute.

In other words, see how our task list develops over time and think about how you want to best apply your efforts. You may feel that this kind of work isn’t for you and you want to apply your efforts elsewhere in the co-op. That’s also fine :slight_smile:

One note I’ll make here is that in the near future we’ll be launching both two “Advocate” programs: Community Advocate and Developer Advocate, which some of your may be eligible to apply for and will involve certain benefits, including a small amount of compensation. One of the things we’ll be talking about as we go here is how to best recognise voluntary efforts in the cooperative.

What’s our initial agenda?

We’ll be setting our agenda in our first in-person check-in, but here’s what it will likely include (suggestions also welcome)

  1. Forum UX, in particular the user funnels. The Discourse forum is used for multiple purposes. We have started to develop user funnels that direct people to different parts of the forum depending on their purpose. We need to keep developing that, including adding things like analytics.

  2. Forum Design. We’re rolling out a new design update as part of the Resonate Re-Launch. This currently is being worked on for the website and player. We may need to apply some of the same designs to the Community.

  3. Forum Visibility. We’re planning to make parts of the forum public. This has been summarised nicely by @Hakanto here we need to continue that effort and flesh out:

    • which categories are going public
    • what stakeholders to we need to explicitly reach out to before we pull the trigger
    • how this interrelates with point 1 (i.e. the user funnels)
  4. Group management. We’ve started to use the group system in Discourse to manage different aspects of the cooperative. We need to think though our approach here in a more systematic fashion so we’re not leaving anyone out of the loop, or missing any opportunities to improve the way we work and cooperate

  5. Diversity. As it is already an important nexus for the cooperative, and will be more so over time, it’s important we keep the values of the cooperative a first priority in the way we administer the community. This may mean a few things in practice, e.g.

    • should we add identity signifiers into community profiles
    • how do we improve usability for non-english or non-english-as-a-first-language users?
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@angus can I add to the agenda to brainstorm some sort of business-relevant KPIs (more nuanced than “more plays”) and some easy, community-oriented action item to help bring them over the edge?

Like for example:
KPI: number of artists 100 plays or less of getting paid out (due to the payment processor fees)
Example forum-related action item: Pick one of the artists, create a playlist featuring their tracks (and other tracks), share in forum

This is following the philosophy of “what gets measured gets done”, and also some people who want to help out in a passive way can contribute by listening to the playlist.

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@boopboop I love it!

What would we call that in its generic form… “Forum Development”, or “Music / Community Integration”. Something like that.

Yes, we’ll discuss how we can turn ideas like that into reality.

Second KPI from:

Of artists / labels that have made it past the credit card fee threshold in the past 4 weeks, what can be done to get them to 50 euros (per month or per year) ?

edit: I mean, what would it take to get them to 50 euros? If we had to move mountains, have a call with them to coordinate a marketing campaign, or stand in the streetcorner signing people up and pressing the play button for them, what would it take?

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I can not emphasize how much I agree with this statement and the underlying suggestion.

I don’t have much to add, I’m still digesting on @thehouseorgan 's great post and I really appreciate the direction the discussion is taking.

I’m sad I won’t be able to attend the team call (3am>4am is just a little too complicated for me) but yes, these are very crucial discussions.

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@community Hey guys, here we go!

September 15

Kick-off call for the community team attended by @community + @datafruits. Thanks everyone for coming. I think we made a great start :slight_smile: RSVP for the next one if you can make it, and no stress if you can’t.

Initial agenda

Focusing on the start of the user funnel for the community, and the diversity of the community

  • What pages on the website should feature community content to demonstrate what is being discussed. @Hakanto will consider this in the context of the new website design and propose updates to that. @boopboop and @angus will implement the design by embedding the various resources from the community in the hugo site.

  • We want to think about the diversity of the community from the beginning and all throughout our work. @brndnkng will start us off in that respect by looking at with

    • A list of strategies we can use to collect data on the current diversity of resonate as a cooperative and community, i.e. method and scope.
    • A list of identity variables we’ll use to measure the diversity of the community and a rationale for the list, e.g. ethnicity, gender, geographic and linguistic.

How we’ll work async

For our async work we can use the #platform:community category. Each individual task we work on as part of this work will probably deserve it’s own topic in the category, for example @Hakanto will a new one to discuss how we’re going to insert the community into the website which @boopboop and I will follow up on. @brndnkng, if you could make a new topic in the category with your initial thoughts on your task and we’ll use that to develop the plan, and the execution of the plan.

edit I’ve updated the OP to reflect what this team is doing in a short descriptive way: Community Team

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@Hakanto I know this was not my assigned bullet point but an (not 100% forum related) easy win imo is to fix / update the tags for the Spanish language music. Is this easy to do? (Not coming up with the best tags, but rather fixing the tag).

Case in point, this is tagged #gospel

It makes it a lot easier to discuss Spanish language music if it’s easy to find. We can’t use country as a proxy since people everywhere sing in English and the US has tons of Spanish-language musicians, for example.

edit: OR have a “language” field at the track or album level so it leaves the tags alone but we have some way of tracking the language.

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@community Hey guys, looking forward to our next chat tomorrow. Just making sure you’ve seen @brndnkng’s great work here

We’ll be discussing that first, followed by a follow up on this

And we might get to a discussion and maybe some practical tweaks on how we’re using and highlighting user groups here on the forum.

See you tomorrow (well tomorrow for me at least) :slight_smile:

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@community hey all, here’s a room for our call

September 22

@community Great call all! Here’s what we discussed

Diversity and Inclusion Survey

This week @brndnkng will build on the survey draft, with the following

  • Finalising the list of questions (incl phrasing and list of options for each)

    • We’ll include a question about ability/disability
    • We’ll include a question about whether the person is from a rural or urban area
    • We’ll include supplementary question for each question about how important the identity or affiliation is for the person
  • A paragraph-long introduction to the survey describing what it is and why we’re doing it

@Hakanto will finalise 2 to 5 questions about the person’s relationship with Resonate, which will be included at the start of the survey.

I’ll have a look at the mechanics of the survey, starting with talking with @melis_tailored:

  • We’d like to send this survey to all folks with a resonate account. What kind of mailing lists do we currently have?
  • Would it be possible for us to send this survey to a mailing list via Mailchimp?

Website community embeds

@Hakanto will come to a landing on what community topics we’re going to embed on the new website, specifically

Homepage

  • Topic from the music category
    • Videogame music
  • Topic from the co-op category
  • Topic from the platform category

Co-op page

  • Co-op category
  • A topic the co-op category’
  • A topic from the platform category

Stream to own

  • 1 topics from the music category (?)

Once he’s decided on a what topics we want to embed, we’ll then ask @Timothee to assist in how best to insert them into the current design. @boopboop and I will do the actual implementation.

Featured Playlist Competition

We’re going to run a competition to select a user playlist to feature in the player here on the community. @boopboop will be looking at the structure and mechanics of the competition.

  • Where we’ll run it and how folks can participate
  • The length of the competition
  • How we’ll select a winner
  • How we let people know about the competition. Perhaps we can include something in an email distro (@melis_tailored ?)
  • How we feature the winning playlist in the player: most likely in the discover section, with a link back to the winning entry in the community.

p.s. @boopboop we’re all looking forward to a picture of that hermit crab, the fifth member on our call :stuck_out_tongue:

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[Technical aside: I can’t undo my like. Does the option to unlike a like expire?]

Update. No… the functionality of like-reversal isn’t time based. It seems to be an immediate condition that is isolated to this thread. I suspect a parameter setting.

I’d rate this setting as ‘sub-optimal’: diminishes user’s control of their voice.

not a hermit crab after all!

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@community doing a trial run of a wiki poll app

Please check it out here - All Our Ideas - Bringing survey research into the digital age

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Nice! However I think we should try using the native discourse polling here. Here’s where you can access it.

Screenshot at Sep 24 11-20-52

Building the ballot is the issue though, the poll assumes the items are already decided.

Doing a wiki post could be a solution but there’s the paranoia someone accidentally deletes someone else’s submission. A thread is also an option?

Thread is good. Also our old wordpress gravity forms toolkit is a good and easy way to build dynamic web forms.

See this for example:

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