I’m Rosie Sherry, I build communities and I'm the founder of Rosieland. AMA 🔥

@automatedtester Community is a team effort, I think it would be really hard to build an authentic community without the engineering expertise. The best communities are founded and started by the experts and I think it's a big reason communities start to fail, we need those 'passionate' experts to keep driving communities forward. However, the amount of 'operations' required to run a community often goes unnoticed, there's probably a lot of day to day community admin stuff that could be allocated to a community manager rather than an engineer. That would at least start to free up some of their time to perhaps work on more valuable or impactful things. And what should they avoid? Mostly being wasteful and vanity metrics (and in contrast focus on solving problems and being creative/refreshing in the work being done).

@nikhilbapna ❤️

@sydney_liu_sl I love Front Porch forum, how it breaks the norms and has found a way to succeed with local communities. They do things like delaying the ability to respond to a message to once a day. Facebook would benefit from having this functionality 🤣 I'm also a fan of local communities and feel it is very much an underserved market. https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/...

@richw build relationships, have conversations, become known for that person/company/community that does x. Do as much as you can in 'public'. People are put off this because it is slow, but the deeper you go, the more relevant you become and the more people will pay attention to you.

@bogdan_negrila if you have a following, then you have plenty of people to reach out to. I'd start by contacting people personally and trying to build a relationship and common understanding. Or maybe host an event, or create some kind of invite and see who shows up. Maybe punters don't want to share their inside knowledge? Maybe coming for the information is enough? We don't need community for everything.

@rosiesherry thank you very much for your answer.

@rosiesherry @bogdan_negrila You can also try and post on https://biztoc.com by Mark Cuban

@runqiu Q: What's the ideal size of an accountability group? I was thinking 15-20 because I assume only half will actively participate. I think it depends on the context. For cohorts, which is related to Maven, I'd personally prefer smaller groups. I've spoken to people time and time again who say they get overwhelmed when there are too many people in the room. The ideal size (imho) being around 5 people. If it's bigger than this then there is too much small talk and not enough getting deeper into what really matters. The best conversations happen when people have deeper understanding of everyone's situation. There's so much generic advice out there that is not actually helpful A thing happened in a cohort I did: 6 students self organised into private DM Slack Group. The self organisation was based on them having a break out room in our first intro session. These students were the most engaged and stuck through until the end. The other students completion rate was much lower. I would also encourage considering neurodiverse needs, for some people it is torture openly speaking with others, some will only want to lurk, some will prefer async discussions, or even the ability to ask anonymous questions. Q: What's the best way to "put them in touch"? This such a hard one. I still opt for Slack every single time, but it can also depend on the context and the tools people prefer. I'm edging towards more forum like stuff these days, especially with the likes of Discourse and Circle now offering 'chat' within these spaces. Forums are great for longer term discussions that people can look back on too, that's just not an option with the likes of Slack. It is with Discord, but I just think many people don't search past conversations that much. Q: I know people are bad at self-organizing. How do I ensure that they actually meet without me creating Zoom links for them? This is so hard. The reality is that you may need various touch points, some people need a calendar invite, some need email reminders, some need a place to check. Make it as easy as possible. For example, I like Whereby for this, where you can create URLs for rooms that don't change and people can just show up. Butter.us has similar functionality, though from a very different use case.

@zainab_saeed1 Sure, the best places to find me are at: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rosi... Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/rosiesherry Website: https://rosie.land (newsletter + membership)

@anne_robertson thanks!

@vincent_meco I have monetized communities, in varying ways. With Rosieland I use Ghost as my main website and membership. With Ministry of Testing that I founded, it's membership, events, sponsorship, but most of it is custom built, when necessary. And I don't think there is a 'best', but I'd love to see easier to implement membership options that also handle tax requirements.

@jas801 Sure.