Developing professional communities

Over the last week I have had the privilege of spending time talking with a lot of different people who are able to influence the Steem ecosystem in various ways. Some of them are application owners and developers, some content creators an many community engagers. All of them hold the belief that it is the community that holds value here even though they might go about it in different ways.

One of the current problems on Steem is that in order to earn without stake, one has to post which means those who run communities have to manage all of the background work, plus find time to post something. This isn't easy and for those who do spend a lot of time in communities would realize how much effort it takes.

There are of course community functionalities coming that will help with the organizational aspects of managing them but in the early phases at least, this doesn't close the gaps in value for leaders. As I see that communities will be one of the driving forces of Steem's success, in time we have to find ways to have pro or at least, semi-pro organizers. Whilst a challenge under current infrastructure, the introduction of SMT's and Oracles could potentially change the way communities are operated.

Applications are the future of Steem but their success depends on leveraging the community to garner support. They need content to fill their sites and of course, eyes to consume the content. This will increasingly come at a cost, even if their model is compelling and the earning potential good for users as having supporting communities will mean a much higher level of engagement at a lower cost to the application.

Using an SMT, an application could distribute tokens to communities with some portion of them earmarked for community organizers and moderators. Essentially, each community can run as a little application itself with paid organizers and moderators that offset the personal costs associated with management. There are several benefits to paying for this for the application.

One is of course widening distribution of their token and encouraging usage of their application. Another is that with that distribution comes ownership and the more ownership people feel they have, the more willing they are to protect it and of course, word of mouth it onward. Having professional organizers with application stake means that there will also be the ability for a much clearer line of discussion and feedback from the communities themselves which translates into apps that are more sensitive to the changing needs of their user base.

The oracles come int play because they could be used in various ways to evaluate the fitness of the organizer and potentially the organization itself. This means that a person in charge of a large community with 10,000 members could be distributed to at a different rate than one with 100 members due to the difference in responsibility. It is not the size that counts, but that depends on the application and its purpose and having mechanisms in place to be able to recognize the values of individuals is important.

In time, the Steem ecosystem is going to evolve from cottage industry only to include more and more professional services. This means that there are also going to be an increasing number of intermediaries of sorts that offer less tangible value than a post or an app. The ability for an SMT to st aside some of their inflation/supply for community development and maintenance gives the opportunity to really leverage as well as show how important the communities are to their success. This can both serve as feeder support for the application as well as risk management across several communities.

Even though I am not quite sure how this will look, the growing dependence on communities means more responsibility on the shoulders of those who are managing and this work should be rewarded in time. I know that for several of the curation communities, management is a somewhat thankless job, no matter how vital it is to the system. What I am hoping is that application developers are factoring in to their design and business models ways to find, evaluate and reward community orientated people and leaders so that all of their behind the scenes work will not only be for the love of it.

The love of it is a vital piece of the puzzle but it cannot be only based on this, eventually, there has to be return. It isn't suitable for the applications of the future to leverage the communities yet fail to return to those communities. What I see happening however is a great deal of coaction, interaction and cross platform alliances that weave a tangled but very robust web. I am going to keep repeating until it is a known reality, community is the value of Steem and the more bridges that get built between app, community and the key individuals, the more likelihood of success.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]