Bit of context: I am going to be cycle-touring through Europe for the coming twelve months.
The talk about local communities starting up got me thinking about having a community for real-life meetups in my situation. I would love to get involved, but I will not have a set location for the next year. However, I would love having a community with other travellers who happen to be in the same area so we can meet up for a bit.
So, ideally I would like to be able to have a ‘Cycle-touring Europe’ group, since it is relatively doable to do a detour to meet up somewhere in Europe compared to having such a group globally, while having such groups per country does not make sense when you cross borders very often. I guess the same could work for digital nomads or people who will be doing a backpacking trip in South-East Asia next year. I think this can be a nice addition to generate some hype for the platform in specific communities such as cyclists or digital nomads without actually having to build specific features for those communities.
What do you all think about regional communities for those without a stable location?
I think these types of communities could also be essential for things like ridesharing, hitchhiking, dumpster diving, couch “crashes” (or multinational Couchsurfing events) in regions that are culturally/climate-ly/language-ly similar.
Eventually we will have groups where people can gather and chat about specific Interests, but then will groups be nestled under geographical communities? It would defeat the purpose of starting a “solo female travelers in Asia” group if you can only start it in a country community, for example.
Also, The communities we are currently rolling out will only be location based, but I’d like to know to what extent events/community stuff can be cross posted to multiple locations. For example, can an event that’s something like “hitchhike race across Europe in one week!” Be cross-posted into every country where that event will take place?
Love the idea! Though I think it makes sense to focus on building local communities first. Wouldn’t it be sufficient to have global groups to get started? And later on think about if some of these groups would work better on the platform as regional travel communities?
E.g. on Atlas Obscura they have Trips and Places. Would you envision something similar, another section alongside local communities?
Thanks for the response
If we would take nomadic people as an example, they can’t really be cornerstones of local communities anyway. So I get that we would want local communities asap, but since there should be little overlap in people willing and able to lead nomadic communities and those willing and able to lead local ones, I don’t really see why we can’t do both from a community leadership perspective
Looking from a technical perspective, I think our data model should be flexible enough to accomodate this, so we should be able to do this with limited additional technical effort. I think the only thing is that the communities I envision fall between the gap of the concept of local “face-to-face” country-or-smaller communities and global interested-based communities.
I would say that these communities can be displayed in a similar way to other communities on our platform. Not sure how the designs for those look, so can’t really comment on that
Yes, I guess it’s not so much a technical issue, but rather about user interaction. I think it’s essential we have a simple and direct access to local communities (a city, a region,…). But then, as @Emily points out, where and how would things show up that stretch over communities and regions?
Even if they’d be cross-posted to several local places, I could imagine these would need a distinct “home” section on the app.
I think that’s one thing we don’t have yet but I’d think would be nice. For now it would be possible to have a community in the Netherlands and have a group of cyclists in the Netherlands, but it is not possible to link the group of cyclists in the Netherlands to cylists in Europe or cyclists worldwide. In techincal terms: I’d say a local interest group should have both the interest and the place as ‘parents’ so you can easily link local interest groups. But I guess that would be a separate, but still valid, issue than the one I had in mind when starting this topic.
The issue that got me started was that, as far as I know, we are allowing (interest-based) groups within a global community and within countries, but not within regions of similar countries, which would reduce their usefullness.
This is one of the main use cases for groups. In the Couchers.org ecosystem, groups function in similar ways to communities but are based around interests rather than location, and anyone can administer them (not just moderators). Each group must be tied to a location for the purpose of moderation and discoverability, but we can have “global groups” where that location is the whole world, which would suit the case of a group that goes across country lines.
As you said @lenanrt we are flexible enough to accommodate this. Communities and groups are actually the same abstraction in the backend, which we call “clusters”, which function as geographically-based clustering of content (pages, events, discussions, etc.). The only difference is that for each geographic region, one cluster is the “official” one (i.e. the “community”) and the other ones are non-official (i.e. “groups”), which lets us place moderators and define all the content that they moderate.
