Community Best Practices
Pinned Posts
Pinned posts help orient the community and guide the governance process. We’ve seen that pinned posts are one of the most important items that a Common forum can have. Pinned posts often include:
Governance Process Post. Organizes the community more during governance activities and increases transparency. Example:https://commonwealth.im/dydx/discussion/1481-drc-dip-proposal-lifecycle
Project & Community Intro Post
Example:https://commonwealth.im/edgeware/discussion/959--new-to-edgeware-start-here
Community Calendar with all events and community calls
Forum Guidelines. Sets the rules for how the forum will be used. Example:https://commonwealth.im/dydx/discussion/1482-dydx-governance-community-forum-guidelines
Organizing Topics & Thresholds
To start, it is a good idea to start with less topics than to have a bunch of empty ones taking up space. The sidebar also has a limited amount of space so be careful of how many topics you pin to the sidebar. Here are a couple good topics to start off with if you are unsure which topics you should launch your Common space with:
General
Governance
Community Feedback
Setting topic thresholds for your chosen topics is dependent on how open you’d like your community to be. Generally we see higher topic thresholds for any governance related topic and lower thresholds (if any) for general topics and feedback topics.
Launching forum
Before launching a forum, we recommend checking out a couple of our existing fully built-out forums to ensure that you aren’t missing anything. Here are a couple great forums to reference:
1inch https://gov.1inch.io/
TreasureDAO https://commonwealth.im/treasure-dao/discussions
Another best practice that we’ve seen projects do before launching the forum to the community is launching with 1-2 discussion posts in the forum. Launching with a forum that isn’t empty increases community engagement significantly because it gives members content to interact with right at launch.
To get more traffic to the forum at launch make sure to link your Common forum on the project website. This also shows users that this is officially affiliated with your project.
Launching the forum with discussion posts is important because it means you aren’t launching an empty forum. Launching an empty forum puts the responsibility on users to start the conversation. If you launch the forum a couple discussion posts it makes it easier for users to get engaged.
General Forum Setup Tips
Make sure to utilize all features that are available to you. For example, if your project is on Ethereum you can be using off-chain governance and on-chain governance along with the token forum.
The default stages that come with every forum are not a one size fits all governance process. Most forums should change the stages up to fit their unique governance process.
Add all relevant links to your project on the forum.
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