What's special about community products anyway?
What is a community (and why it’s not the same as audience, or user, or network)
- Audiences are consumers of ideas, messages, content. They may well get value from it (one hopes so!) and they may even behave differently as a result of consuming it, but it is passive - the impetus comes from the creator or purveyor. Audiences receive. (eg. Traditional media)
- Users interact with your product. They are active (again, one really hopes so!), they tread the pathways you’ve laid out. They may well create as well as consume (eg. Games, Media Apps)
- Networks can have interactions between the users, as well as between the platform provider and themselves. They may send messages, or add connections. (eg. Social Platforms)
*Note, these are not mutually exclusive categories, indeed many popular products blend components of each (LinkedIn is a network that allows you to broadcast blogs to audiences, games may have the possibility to message another gamer etc.)
Communities are another category. They might look like audiences or users or networks - they consume our content, they use our features, they might have profiles - but these are not sufficient conditions for a community.
So what is a community?
Communities;
- Identify with a mission or purpose that extends beyond the feature-set: they are, especially at the ‘core’ group, True Believers
- Feel ownership and autonomy: they have agency to do things, including things that you didn’t trigger and don’t control - you may not even like!
- Get value from each other as well as you: by which I don’t mean they collect each other, I mean they’re interconnected webs of people who give and receive in ways that mutually sustain them
The teams that serve communities need to therefore also be guided by those pillars.
- Purpose. Teams should understand the mission intimately, and be seen as authentic, trusted stewards thereof. This requires integrity that’s undergirded by genuinely shared priorities.
- Autonomy. Teams should be able to identify the “action space” for the community through strong domain expertise, and also know when to get out of the way so people can occupy the action space without them.
- Interconnectedness. They should understand how to facilitate high value connections within the community, ideally because they “belong” there too. They’re dot-connecters.
What does it mean to take seriously that Common Voice is a community first, and a product second?
Communities come here precisely because of that purpose, autonomy and interconnectedness. They express these kinds of sentiments;
Purpose = “I want my children to speak my mother tongue - I want to preserve and revitalise my heritage and culture”
Autonomy = “I want to be the one to decide which accents and sentences go into the dataset, not corporate interests”
Interconnectedness = “I know I can find someone to help me train a model for a language without standardised orthography when I get stuck, because my people are here”
In this way, community, not code, is the heart of Common Voice.