Greetings Felines and Hoomans of the Hive! Hope this day finds you well and healthy!

This is Part I of many of a series of thoughts about Community Building, with the express objective that we want to grow the Hive Community. It's partly inspired by reading posts from the @hiveonboard and @hivepeople projects.

You might wonder what a CAT knows about anything... Actually? Quite a bit. But I'll let you be the final judge of that!

Before You BUILD...

One of the most fundamental tenets of a strong community, and a thriving community, is the sense that everyone feels involved in the building and growth process. And if not exactly everyone, at least a majority.

Not only do we all like to feel like we matter, pretty much ALL the strong and appealing communities I have been part of have had in common that the membership felt GOOD and PROUD of what they are participating in.

Stated a little differently, you know those short "exit surveys" a number of online commerce sites throw at you? And how most of them include the question "Would you recommend XYZ Site to a friend?"

In strong communities, the answer of the majority of community members would be a strong "yes!"

We're Not Actually MARKETING Yet!

Getting a community to the place where people are enthusiastic is something that has to be addressed before going off to "tell the world" about the community.

Here in the Hive, we have a pretty high level of enthusiasm going because hey, we just broken off from Steem, and did so with great success. So that's really good!

But we have to be careful not to "rest on our laurels," because all we have done so far is lay the groundwork. Most of the hard work is ahead of us.

People aren't going to magically show up out of thin air just because we think we're awesome...

Top-down

Top Down Building vs. Bottom Up Building

"Top down" building is what we experience at Facebook, Instagram and other places where new features are just served up by the central organization, and the greater community gets to either "like it or lump it."

Unless a feature is so horrible that nobody at all uses it, the community pretty much has zero say in what gets developed. What gets developed is what suits MANAGEMENT, not what suits the membership.

Although it might have represented an improvement over conventional social platforms, Steemit/Steem was essentially also a "top down" build.

It's difficult to create an engaged and involved community when community development simply appears from the top.

Bottom-up

CONSTRUCTIVE Bottom-Up Building

Developers and organizations tend to "defend" top-down building with the rationalization that "users don't really understand what it takes _____" but that is a bit of a "cover story."

Now, I'll be the first to admit that "building by committee" can be an exercise in futility and time consumption. HOWEVER....

The truth tends to be that most developers are more interested in sharing their technical skills by creating flashy and impressive features that may LOOK awesome — and even be "amazing" — but ultimately have little bearing on how ordinary every-day people USE the system. Many developers are also more interested in back room features than front room features.

Now, my Hooman used to work as a NON-developer in the IT field, and he assures me that having "ordinary users" in charge of building a community would be chaos... and that's not the point.

The POINT is that these "ordinary users" are often the best resource base to guide the developers and community builders in terms of what needs to be built.

Some Simple Examples:

We don't "NEED" a 17th version of a safe way to store our keys. But we might "NEED" a way to organize our photos into "albums" or "folders."

We don't "NEED" a more elegant way to update Hive price feeds. But we might "NEED" to be able to tell whether any of our friends became Hive members after we shared a post to Facebook or twitter.

We don't "NEED" to be told to "check Github" for what is currently being worked on. But we might "NEED" an integrated news feed that's right here and embedded into the end user interface(s).

Simple things like these come to light as a result of those driving the technical side of a community openly ASKING the non-technical majority the a very simple question:

"What features would you most like to see here?"

And that MAKES SENSE; after all this is a Decentralized community, right?

You can't hope to attract, engage and keep a more mainstream user if you're not offering what a more mainstream user is looking for in a social platform!

Naturally, many of the suggestions might be useless and hopeless, but you none-the-less end up with a wishlist that can be worked from.

Anyway, I'm going to "break the flow" there to keep this post from getting too long; better to break all this into bite-sized chunks! More thoughts to follow in the weeks/months ahead!

Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend! And don't forget: Tomorrow is CATURDAY!

=^..^=

Love Cats? Get Involved in Hive's Cat Communties!

If you're a cat lover and often/sometimes post pictures or other content that includes your feline friends, why not become an active part of Hive's growing Cat Communities?

These are some of the more active Cat Communities — why not join them ALL? Remember, you can also "cross-post" your cat posts to them!

HiveCats by @curatorcat is a central "gathering place" for cat content on Hive; promoting the use of the #hivecats tag for feline content!

Cat Snaps by @manorvillemike is a place to post pictures of your cats when you don't have a whole lot to say beyond just sharing your cute photos!

Caturday by @saboin is a community where we get to celebrate posts relating to Saturday — aka "Caturday" — our own special day!

Cat Photos by @andrarchy is a "mixed use" cat content community; posts can be just photos or longer, as long as the subject is CATS!

Cats by @captainklaus (and Sissi!) is another "general" cat content community.

Last but certainly not least, don't forget the dPet Community created by @kona, which is the original pet related "channel," and which typically also has lots of cat photos! This is also the home of the Daily Pet Photography challenge!

There are a number of other feline communities listed on Hive, but I am not sharing them for now as they have not had any activity (by their Admins OR users) since the Steem/Hive fork. Updates as they become available!

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