Roles in community building
Community building is the process of bringing a group of people together to achieve a set of collective goals. It is a practice that requires different aptitudes.
Most commonly we can observe three main roles involved in this process:
The Settlers (operates, focused on steady state growth and maintenance)
The Explorers (experiments, focused on growing via leaps and bounds)
The Town planners (strategizes, focused on optimizing efforts)
This framing of aptitudes is borrowed from Simon Wardley’s framework.
The settlers (community management)
The settlers of a community maintain a community’s core basic functions and facilitates steady state organic growth. This is also understood as the ‘community manager’.
Settlers are responsible for variety of community operations from running community calls, moderating discord and telegram groups, engaging existing community stakeholders, onboarding new community members, working on documentation to anything that enables either existing community members.
Settlers as the operational backbone of communities.
The explorers (community growth)
In a community, the explorers are the ones focused on experimenting with new opportunities for the community to grow in leaps and bounds.
The work of an explorer is focused on discovering as well as creating new opportunities for the community to grow as opposed to growing the existing community itself.
Explorers are the ones working on building up new community distribution channels such as a new community resources, content creation, fostering high value partnerships, relationship building, and conducting customer interviews to analyse greenfield market opportunities.
Explorers are experimenters and drive growth for a community.
The town planners (community strategy)
The town planners of a community are those that drives the strategy behind how a community should grow and where community building efforts are best allocated. A town planner’s role is understand and discover how to allocate community building efforts and resources to areas of greatest leverage.
20% of your efforts will drive 80% of your results
Crafting the right community development strategy is a process of discovery and iteration. It is shaped and formed over time as a community increasing runs more experiments and are able to observe more feedback cycles around their initiatives around the settlers and explorers.
General misunderstandings with these roles
Settle before exploring. Most projects try to grow fast before they’ve built a community with meaningful participation first. Make sure you take care of the needs and priorities of the current community before growing more aggressively. Without a community that is able to retain community, further efforts to bring in new participants will be a wasted effort.
Community is a creative process. At the core of community building is relationship building, a process that rarely can be forced — it takes patience, time and different approaches to succeed for both settlers and explorers. Not giving enough creative freedom to experiment is a great way to waste your team’s time and energy.
Town planning requires operational experience. Project founders without community building experience often fail to recognize their inexperience in community building, despite attempting to play the role of town planner. If either settler or explorer roles on the team are unable to fill the town planner role, try to find advisors or more experienced third parties to assist and help. Town planning requires clarity and coherence.
Conclusion
Community building is a practice that is ultimately about people and relationships, one that can be learned and broken down into comprehendible ideas. Much of it is putting faith into the process that typically is learned with time and lots of trial and error.
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