Building effective user communities

In 2013, I wrote about building digital signage with Raspberry Pis. We're still at it. Several months ago, I pointed out one of our displays to our CIO and mentioned that there didn't seem to be any forum to sharing information about solutions on campus. She mentioned she was aware of 12 independent efforts on campus trying to buy, build, or implement digital signage, none of which are aware of the others. She's taken the issue seriously and is moving the campus toward building user communities around important topics. Toward that end, they've scheduled an event for Thursday at 1pm.

The current model that the campus has fostered, are "Tech Talks". But they are organized around a few-to-many model. I think user communities need to be less structured. Our UMass Drupal Users Group could serve as a good model. The qualities that have made the group so successful include: a dedicated core group of users that draws from both on and off campus, an online forum to post announcements and schedule events, simple threaded discussion, and regular meetings with both structured and unstructured events.

The biggest challenge to making user communities successful is getting administrators at the University to value the time commitment necessary on the part of faculty, staff, and students to participate and make them work. It takes time to build relationships and the social capital necessary for trust and engagement. But over time, I think it could transform how the campus operates.