We’ll take community seriously when it’s embedded into the product experience

Originally published on Rosieland.

TLDR; The best community experiences are custom built.

Here’s the thing about good community: it blends in so well that you can’t even pinpoint what is community and where it is happening.

It just exists. You know community is there when you walk in the door. It is part of who we are. It’s how we show up. It is what we do, and don’t do. Whether it’s a community of place, practice or product, in great communities you can’t separate it.

It’s how talk and what we say. It’s what we wear. It’s what we stick on our walls. It is the things we create. It is the stories we share and the things we care about.

And all of this means that containing a community in a specific location becomes hard, if not impossible.

And perhaps this is why generic community tools often struggle to find success, we try to insert them in. And we wave 👋 and point 👉 to where community is happening. But we don’t want to go there to have community, we just want to be and have it an active part of who we are and what we do.

When people don’t follow the waves 👋 and points 👉 we are made to feel like we don’t contribute to community. That’s not a great feeling to be feeling. But that is what is happening. We don’t want to have conversations or take action in a separate community space, we want to do it where we are and as part of…