Community with Ramses Oudt // Metamuse podcast episode 62

1:10 - When starting a community: 1. community is for the community members. Not "your" community. It's the members'. 2. As a brand and community facilitator, it's important to highlight useful things from the community. Useful answers, tips & tricks, and workflows. Showcase. 3. Actively involve your community with testing new features. Invite ... See more

Ramses Career origins to becoming community manager for Logseq, a notetaking software as "open-source knowledge base." In learning many languages, Ramses has built skills in community building and in notetaking. Language learning hugely benefits from community support. Now there are new tools in flashcards & notetaking as well. These factors al... See more

About running a community: Having a community is valuable to understand what your user base wants to accomplish. User interviews are a tool, but they can be rather artificial. A community chat or forum is invaluable for educational materials for users. They can find existing article content, or come into the channel to ask a new question. If commun... See more

Discourse and Circle are being used for more curation beyond what Discord can do. Discourse for example allows for your posted content to be indexed by Google, so you get search value.

Why not just apple notes? Apple notes are good for a quick jot down. But it’s not to help you refine your thinking over time like Logseq will. Notes  can be much bigger, such as writing a book, or to design software.

Community helps you: capture intel; we learn from our customers what they want and what they are doing; receive feature requests; learn what potential features are getting buzz before building them; users learn from each other; nowadays we even end up hiring folks through these communities.

0:00 - You want to achieve mastery in some sense in your life. So all these things come together and so for some people community becomes very addictive. I’ve certainly been in communities about products or games, where [those topics] became 2nd importance. Because the community became the main driver to come back to this group of people to nerd ou... See more

About Logseq: it is a tool to organize knowledge, a tool for bullet points. Not as technical as some, but much more technical than others: Emacs, Workflowy, Dynalist, Roam Research, Obsidian. Roam Research (a category defining “knowledge graph”)  and Obsidian are in similar spirit. It's an open source outliner software. Built on top of a datab... See more

48:00 Where and how you post content or reach your users to form community entirely depends on knowing your users. Know their personas, their user journey paths, do they start on your forums, or in chat, or is their default behavior when looking for stuff to type into YouTube. For Logseq 90% of how-to content is videos because of the nature of the ... See more

40:00 Support those existing communities. They put time and effort into cultivating those communities outside of the brand. Then you’ll find when it gets large, e.g. 20K at Logseq, people pop in, ask instead of search for existing answers, and then it requires moderators to manage it. Notion found themselves in a position where they blew up on TikT... See more