Post History

Communities

### Site Name

communities.codidact.com

### Description
The site is about part-time human communities. How to manage, run, create, participate in them and solve common problems. Part time means that it is not anyone's full time job to manage the community.

### Topics
Topics covered would include:

- Advice on creating bylaws, for example along the lines of [Robert's Rules of Order](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert%27s_Rules_of_Order)
- Ensuring the smooth functioning of communities
- Recruiting new members to the community
- Integrating into a community as a member
- How to structure the activities of the community given the needs of a member base
- Examples of communities: Student clubs, neighborhood associations, hobby based meetups (books, games, movies, crafts), social mixers, friend groups, amateur sports leagues, coworking, casual investment clubs, facebook groups, forums, chatrooms, discord channels.
- How to maintain the *culture* of the community
- Online, offline and hybrid communities are on topic.

### Exclusions
These topics or types of posts would be out of scope:

- Communities which are managed full time by a professional. I think this would be too complicated for the typical users of the site I want to propose.
    * This would exclude some well known communities like Toastmasters, unless they have a model where a local chapter can be run part-time.
    * Also, it's enough for *at least one person* to be full time, for it to be off topic. For example, you shouldn't ask about your church, because even though you only go on Sundays, the *priest* manages it full time.
    * Unpaid full time management is still off topic - there should be no one who is spending the majority of their waking hours on the community.
- Social conflict within the community should only be discussed in the context of its effect on the community. For example, "a couple in my poetry club has broken up, how can I keep this from tearing the club apart?" is okay, "how do I get them back together?" is off topic (it has to do with their private lives, and not the club itself).
- Community in the broad sense ("the journalism community at large") is off topic. 
- One off gatherings should probably be off topic. Something like a birthday party seems too fleeting to be called a real community. However, forming a "birthday committee" that regularly organizes parties for everyone would be on topic.

### Special Features
I am open to ideas here. We could do fine without special features. But:

* Online communities could advertise themselves
* Federations of communities (like local disc golf teams in different cities) could describe themselves and encourage people to start their own version in their location
* People can write about their success stories ("how I started movie club in my new town", "how I kept our DnD group going even after everyone graduated college")

### Overlaps
We don't have a site like "interpersonal relationships" but if it existed there would be some obvious overlap. The line would be drawn around whether the interpersonal question affects the community itself.

We don't have sites about business, professional work, politics, religion etc. If we did, questions about communities that have a full time manager would best fit there. 

There is overlap with Webmasters because often sites have discussion boards or other participation. The line is drawn around whether the site is run by a full time professional, or by a volunteer in (a small part of) their free time.

There is potentially some overlap with meta.codidact.com. Questions specifically about CD should of course go there :)