Terms Governing Community Server Launch
A server has been created. The server has seven members. The server has eleven channels.
Incident Report: Community Server Launch Submitted July 2022 Incident Classification: Operational
Summary
At 11:42 PM on a Sunday in June, the subject created a Discord server. The server was created to support a community the subject intended to build around a newsletter with 312 subscribers. The launch had been planned for two weeks and postponed for six.
The server launched with seven members, all of whom were invited directly and all of whom joined out of personal support for the subject rather than organic interest in the topic.
Server Architecture
The server contains eleven channels, organized into four categories. The categories are: Welcome, General, Topics, and Resources. The Topics category contains five channels. The Resources category contains two channels that are currently empty.
The general channel was created first. The general channel has been active. The other ten channels have not been tested under real conditions.
Channel Utilization
The ratio of channels to members is 1.57, which is higher than recommended for a community in its early stage and lower than the subject's instinct for completeness required.
Three of the eleven channels were created in response to a perceived future need for topic segmentation that does not yet exist because the community is seven people who are already talking in general. The three channels are correctly titled. Nobody has posted in them.
Onboarding Process
The server has a rules channel. The rules channel contains five rules. Rule 3 covers behavior in the off-topic channel. There is no off-topic channel. Off-topic was planned and deprioritized during setup; the rule was retained.
New members are instructed by a bot to read the rules and react to the rules message to gain access to the rest of the server. Three of the seven members completed this process. Four members were given manual access by the subject after they messaged the subject directly to say the bot was confusing.
The Governing Rule
A community server requires community before it requires infrastructure, and the infrastructure built before the community exists is built to manage a problem that has not arrived and may not arrive in the form anticipated once it does, which means the eleven channels will be reorganized at least twice before the problem they address is fully understood.
Incident Status
The server is operational. The subject posts in general three times per week to maintain activity. Two of the seven members post independently. The resources channels remain empty.
The subject is considering a twelfth channel. The twelfth channel would be for announcements. The subject has six announcements to make.
Recommendation
Proceed. The gap between the infrastructure and the community it was built for will close, or the infrastructure will be right-sized, or both. Either outcome is acceptable.
The rules channel should be corrected before the server scales.