We’re planning for a heavy emphasis on the local community and this means that there’s going to be city pages. I’d like to run you guys through the concept here and see if y’all have any additional ideas to make it better. Note that the first iteration/build of it might not contain all of the features that’s listed here.
Interest Points
The presentation of these might be similar to what’s on Atlas Obscura, where clicking into an Interest Point brings you to a wiki-style page with more information
Interest Points may be a range of things that are open for submission, such as Tourist Attractions, cafes, walking trails etc.
I’m toying with the idea of upvotes on Interest Points, just so people can “like” what they have enjoyed while traveling or even as a local
Within each Interest Point, there could be a comments section where people can comment tips related to the Interest Point, and people can upvote what has been helpful/useful to them (e.g. “The hamburger here was fantastic!!!” or “They only open up to 4pm on Tuesdays”)
City Forum
Something like this forum, but localised to each city
Generally keep it open to all kinds of topics, e.g. discussion on common interests, the best places to go for the next Couchers community event, etc.
We have been discussing the possibility of automatically promoting people who have reached a threshold of community score into moderators, and limiting the time period in which they are moderators (i.e. rotating moderators) so that clique-like situations don’t happen and power isn’t concentrated. I’d like to hear your thoughts on this if you have any ideas!
Events
Pretty self-explanatory
To keep things tidy, events would have a few broad categories such as road trips, meetups, walking tours, games etc.
Filters like free, tips expected etc.
Hangouts
Hosts
Travelers
A version of public trips that was on CS. I know some people liked it, I’ve used it personally myself to reach out to travelers who were coming to my city, and offered to bring them around.
Let me know if you have thoughts on how to improve this, or think it was working fine for you!
Local Interest Groups
Honestly not too sure if this would be useful if we’re going to have a city forum, let me know your thoughts
Could be things like “Board Gamers”, “Football Buddies in Paris” etc.
I think a proven check against concentrating power is separating it. On the forum, we can try out separating raising issues from reviewing them. So when you are moderator, you can flag a post (like any user can), but you can’t review the same posts you flagged. If that works well, it could be a good model for distributing community moderation.
Hey Kelly, is this also a proposed order for how users would view each section? I like the interest points idea, and of course I’m all about forums, but I think people and what they are doing should be at the top. So probably events, hangouts, travelers, hosts would be the top four things I would want to see.
Interest points is a great idea and all but I’m sure there are plenty like me who just want to link up to interesting people first, and points later
I strongly disagree with automatically promoting people, but I do think it’s critical to have active moderators that can be trusted to moderate in an even-handed, thoughtful way, and in accordance with our values and ToS.
In my experience as a founder & moderator of several communities on Reddit, the most successful means of adding moderators is by asking for volunteers, asking them to fill out an application survey via google forms, vetting the applications based upon their application/survey and post/comment history, and then voting on the best applicant among existing moderators.
This works well for larger/active communities, but would be challenging for smaller/less active communities (ie. small city forums). It might make sense to have “at large” moderators that are responsible for several (or dozens) of small/less active city forums. Once a city forum has become active or large enough, you could request applications for a moderator position (or positions).
As for resolving “clique-like situations”, I think adding new moderators and removing inactive moderators on a “regular basis” (what that means is tbd) in conjunction with moderators leaving on their own (too busy, loss of interest, etc), should prove sufficient to prevent cliques. Also giving admins tools to monitor and manage moderators would help too. A few examples:
Allow members of the community to report moderators (which would be reviewed by admins)
Flag inactive mods (no mod actions taken for x amount of time) for replacement
Flag disproportionate/stagnant moderation teams for admin review (for example: the same 2 people are the only mods for years, despite gaining 10000+ new active users in the city forum)
Flag strange behavior among the mods (statistically excessive post removal, repeated approval of posts that multiple community members have reported, bot-like activity, etc).
