In the new edition of my book, Building Successful Communities of Practice, I share insights into community size and interactions. I've been using this theory with clients to create nested layers that include communities of practice that serve as a model for their organisation.
Wait… whats a Community of Practice?
“Learning is not merely the acquisition of knowledge by individuals. It is a process of social participation.” A slightly bastardised…
Collaborative Groups Protocol
A practical formula for creating and sustaining small, effective groups — designed to work together at scale.
Collaborative Groups Protocol
A practical formula for creating and sustaining small, effective groups — designed to work together at scale.
Why Community Matters: Groups as the Next Step for the Fediverse
Federated groups in Bonfire will be spaces where communities gather to organise, care, and coordinate across the fediverse. They'll live next to your personal feed, but each group having a specific purpose: a study circle, a lab team, an activist collective, a local mutual aid crew, a project team. Inside you’ll find posts, conversations, calendars, shared resources, and more. Crucially, groups will be portable and interoperable.
The Community Manager Pattern - Nick's Blog
This post looks more closely at Brittany Ellich's work on representing groups in ATProtocol. It builds on earlier conversations and explores how these ideas might work in practice.
Neighborhood Steward Fellowship | New_ Public
An eight-week program bringing together leaders of local-oriented online spaces to experiment with fun new practices and ideas
Let’s talk about money
When we were building the first version of Open Collective, we found that communities and their members often had a complex relationship…
Workshops — Guiding Threads Collective
Our skill-building workshops help participants build their toolkit around key organizational development areas, including growing leadership skills, developing generative conflict practices, and making collaborative decisions.
Open Social Network Cookbook
The Open Social Network Cookbook is the collective product of the Open Social Incubator, a cohort that MEDLab hosted from Fall 2024 to Spring 2025. At the heart of our work together was the question: How can the online communities that we participate in use tools that truly reflect our values?
TeamTopologies/Team-Topologies-Community-Materials
A list of materials relating to Team Topologies (articles, tools, canvases, etc.) generated by the community.
Building Welcoming Communities
Building a community that encourages people to use, contribute to, and evangelize your project.
Facilitation Techniques and Workshop Activities | Library
Hundreds of group facilitation activities for workshops, meetings and training sessions. Find the best team building activities, energisers, process facilitation and leadership development...
🧭🏘️📲 Exploring a new social product for local communities
We’re seeking local partners for collaboration as we pilot new concepts and designs
Representing groups in ATProto
I wanted to add book clubs to my GoodReads-like app (Collective), but ATProto doesn't have a standard way to handle shared group resources yet. So I'm building opensocial.community—a separate service that manages groups independently from any single app. This means the same book club could potentially work across multiple apps (imagine your book club having both a reading list in Collective AND a discussion forum in another app), and groups can migrate between providers if needed. It's probably over-engineered for my use case, but might help other ATProto developers building community features.
Representing groups in ATProto
I wanted to add book clubs to my GoodReads-like app (Collective), but ATProto doesn't have a standard way to handle shared group resources yet. So I'm building opensocial.community—a separate service that manages groups independently from any single app. This means the same book club could potentially work across multiple apps (imagine your book club having both a reading list in Collective AND a discussion forum in another app), and groups can migrate between providers if needed. It's probably over-engineered for my use case, but might help other ATProto developers building community features.
Content and Community
The old model for content sprung from geographic communities; the new model for content is to be the organizing principle for virtual communities.
