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How deeply do you involve members into the community?

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Shawn Gossman

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How do you involve your members into your community?

Do you just provide a community for them and nothing else?

Or do you involve them in making key decisions that will impact the future and growth of the community overall?

How important is involving members as deeply as possible in the community?

How are you doing this on your forum?
 
I get my moderators involved in decision making and will announce decisions to members for feedback but overall I'll generally have the final say. I'm happy to take in constructive feedback though.
 
I get my moderators involved in decision making and will announce decisions to members for feedback but overall I'll generally have the final say. I'm happy to take in constructive feedback though.
I think that is the best way to do it.

Let the moderators have some say and the members give feedback with your judgment being final.

If you've created a trusting and loyal community, members and staff are usually going to go with the flow of whatever your decisions are.

Unless they're controversial of course, then it might get spicy on the forum :eek:
 
I try to involve members with advance warning of upgrades, major changes, and feedback and adjustments afterwards. I run polls on things to find out what users think on subjects. I also consult with moderators, especially on moderation related stuff. For my friends' forum, I recently did an upgrade for SMF to 2.1, and spent a lot of time tweaking settings afterward via user feedback.

While final decisions always rest with me, keeping your community onside is important.

The great counterexample is the Keymags forum (key.aero) - one of the most active aviation forums at the time - where the parent company decided to upgrade their website to Drupal and convert the forum to the native Drupal forum function at the same time.

Without telling anyone in advance, even their moderation team.

Without any testing of the converted forum functionality in advance. Which was missing vast amounts of functionality compared with the old forum.

The result:

A dead forum. Within a month, ghost town.
 
It is important to have a well-structured plan and foundation for your forum that should mostly be in place before there are any members. However, feedback and community input is essential for surviving and even growing as needed to build out your forum.

Overall, I have a very set plan that is open to change as needed. I handle everything with the most open communication I can and try to grab feedback asap in the event that something has gone wrong. Then I can sort out how the changes are needed.

Yes, it is your community and YOU need to make it grow and thrive in a world with our vision, but the current users are the ones actually involved in that vision, and keeping them their and happy is generally a great way to also keep your vision healthy and happy as you progress. It is a balancing act for sure.
 
It is important to have a well-structured plan and foundation for your forum that should mostly be in place before there are any members.
I think this is a big deal, too.

I think many forum owners fail because they don't initially plan and strategize from the start.

You launch the forum and expect the best to happen. Then it doesn't. Then you're like, what now?

Planning is a critical component of a successful forum.
 
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