Virtual community spaces play a vital role in fostering connections and facilitating collaboration within any community. The first step in creating a successful community space is choosing the right tools, followed by setting them up in a way that best supports the community.
Leveraging her expertise in community management and deep understanding of user needs, Mollie has successfully transformed lackluster channels into vibrant hubs of conversation, as well as created community spaces from scratch. Through strategic planning, content curation, and fostering meaningful discussions, she has enhanced community engagement, driving increased participation and fostering a stronger sense of belonging.
This section showcases some specific projects focused on creating and/or revitalizing virtual community spaces.
Chat Spaces
GX Slack Revamp (2023)
Mollie led the revamp of the GX slack community space. The users had frustrations getting the help they needed and GX employees were overwhelmed trying to provide them with what they needed.
Some of the tasks involved int his slack revamp were as follows:
- Structure: proposed (and eventually enacted) a new structure to the GX slack. This included:
- creating new topic-specific channels to provide a space for specific activities (sharing projects, release updates, data quality discussions)
- archiving redundant or unused channels
- renaming channels to make the purpose more clear
- External Communications
- Wrote a How to get your questions answered post to guide user to ask their questions efficiently in slack
- Wrote a Slack guidelines document to help GX slack members best navigate the slack community space.
- Drafted messages to the community to updated them about 1. upcoming changes before they took place and 2. changes that occurred after they were complete
- Internal Communications
- Created an internal How to interact with the GX Community Slack Guide to suggest ways that GX employees could best interact with the slack
Creation and fostering of DVS Slack (2019)
As the co-founder of the Data Visualization Society, I also co-created the slack that goes with it. I will detail below some of the thing we did to encourage the growth of a healthy community (but please also keep in mind that I’m writing this section four years after it happened, so I am almost certainly missing things)
- Suggestions channel: being that we were a brand new organization and space, we knew that there would be plenty of room for adjustment and improvement as we learned more about and better understood the community. Members of the DVS were and are encouraged to post any suggestions they have into the channel, which in the beginning was largely composed of suggestions of new channels and about the slack forum, and later.
- #dvs-topics-in-data-viz: During her time as events director (2019-2022), Mollie organized the #topics-in-data-viz channel. Every two weeks, a new facilitator would start a new data visualization related discussion in the channel. Because the discussion facilitators were typically members of DVS, this channel gave members a chance to get more involved and facilitate conversations around topics they were interested in and excited about. Mollie organized putting calls out for facilitators and setting the topic discussion schedule.
- moderators: All new channels required at least one moderator, and ideally two. If someone suggested a new channel, we would often created it as soon as we had enough moderator volunteers to do so
- Sharing updates and asking for feedback: from the start, it always felt extremely valuable to share regular updates and request feedback in order to allow the community to iterate with the needs of the community
- Types of channels
- location channels: It immediately felt pretty important to additionally allow an easy way for people to connect locally. Anyone who wants to create a new location channel for their area can!
- connect channels: these channels help enable people who identify in certain ways or work within certain groups to connect with others who are in similar spaces. e.g. #connect-freelance, #connect-lgbtq, #connect-team-up
- share channels: these serve as spaces to share things like personal work, inspiration, jobs, and requests for feedback
- topic channels: these channels provide spaces for folks to discuss particular topics they’re interested in. e.g. data art, diversity, research, etc.
- help channels: spaces where people can get help, either from the board, or from other members!
Discourse
I worked with Great Expectations to prepare their Discourse space to be the main place they suggest users go for support questions, while still maintaining Slack as a vibrant place for community interactions.