🤼‍♂️ HOMIES MOB : Design a creative community online.

concept definition, human design, gamification, process, differenciation, brand value definition, wording, simplification, ux design, community animation

October 2019 | 20 min read

TL;DR

The Marcus and Trane collective designed a fun and homely project accelerator. It is mostly based online, and nests projects for the members, the collective, and every association in between.
Community life is heavily based on self-imposed traditions and homemade processes in order to avoid apathy and boost projects.

Context

Marcus and Trane (M&T) is a collective of creatives and entreprenarial people.
The idea is to create various projects together, help each other, all while having a good time.

• We made the choice to focus on creating products, art or services first, with little or no focus on communication. Of course, we knew that we needed a little audience to provide early feedback and to spread the good word when a project hatched.

• As each member started to recommend that this friend or that acquaintance joined the group, we realised not everyone was a good fit for Marcus and Trane. Some people had very impressive skills and track records, but didn’t fit enterely the culture we wanted to promote. Letting them go was often felt as a missed opportunity.

• Also, some people were very curious towards Marcus and Trane and drawn to its philosophy, but were’nt especialy interested in any project, considering they already had their own side-projects.

That’s why we came up with the idea of creating a separated group, a different community. At the begining we wanted Super-fans that will try all our products, vote for wanted features and praise every knowledge bite we threw at them. We wanted Fanboy Alpha Testers, but FAT isn’t always good for health.

This is what we created :

Product : The Homies Mob, a creative club to grow together

Design

Now onto the design phase with the study of people involved, the philosophy to respect, the tools choices, the design tweaks and the main focus point :

Stakeholders

The Homies Mob is made out of people that orbit around Marcus & Trane. They share, to some extend, the spirit and vision of the collective, but aren’t necesarely interested of being a part of it. The mob is also composed by members of M&T, that are invited to participate daily, and aren’t treated as VIP members.

Here is a list of different actors we identified :

• Homies Mob members typology :

  • Community Homie : This Homie has solo projects, but is ready to share them. He also likes to be stimulated by new ideas, and is ready to help others or join existing projects. He loves to shares its discoveries and to debate.
    Basically the perfect fit !

  • Solo Homie : This one is used to working solo, and is here to accelerate its own projects. He is more a watcher than an actor online, and crafts awesome products without sharing it with anyone, caveman style.
    Great potential we hope to convert to a more active community member.

  • Helper Homie : Helpers are curious who haven’t took the steps to launching projects, but love to discover new ideas and fields. They seem to be searching for the “right project” before commiting to it. They are awesome at helping others, sometime with a disconcerting ease.
    Essential members we hope to help flourish, or will help us do so.

  • M&T members : Similar to “Community Homie”, but with the added responsability of helping recruting and sponsor new members. Keep it up !

  • Group animators : M&T members that take the role of creating events, moderating, stating rules an setting up systems. Love those guys

• Brands involved :

  • Projects brands : Projects seems to all respect a bootstrapping strategy ( doing it with what you have, no fundraising, except maybe crowdfunding ). They all share a love for D.I.Y ( do it yourself ) and a hate for bullshit lingo.
    They seem guided by values close to M&T like professional fun or knowledge sharing. They also and follow interest M&T loves like geekculture, art, technology, webculture, marketing, hacking, strangeness, and streeculture.
    We select projects to try keeping it that way, but stay open to novelty.

  • Marcus and Trane : M&T is here in a umbrella role, providing a common base for projects in term of finance, marketing, and legal stuff. The brand provides direction, ressources, and oppotunity for boosting projects (like community events)
    We are happy with this umbrella model that helps to mutualise most things.

  • The Homies mob : Last brand, the accelerator itself. We are currently growing and, for now, stay in the shadows with an invite-only system.
    Still very close to M&T, the brand is still very mysterious for exterior eyes.

Here is a data recap made by observing current members :

Design philosophy

To respect our inclinations, the group must be fun and stimulating, but also effective and useful.

I used here an ideation tool I made especialy for team bulding, the pragmamide.

For the fun part of it, we’re not worried… but for the efficiency of this online accelerator, we feel the urge to set up mecanisms.

Most interactions between members happen on the Homies Discord, an online chat tool, where M&T members are also present on a daily basis.
We all have a hunch that managing an online group and keeping it alive is a tough task that can make administrators go nuts. It's true !
That’s why we designed sytems to keep it manageable and avoid common issues.

Weapons of choice

Speaking from experience, I tend to consider an online-based project organization as good if it had implemented tree main tools :

My triangle of good tool setup for online projects.

• Communication tool : The place to share daily infos, discuss issues and contact people.
• Task managing tool : The place to get a macro view of tasks, goals and overall progress.
• Collaborative File sharing tool : The place to share working docs, and collaborate on it.

Concerning the communication tool, we knew it will be the most impacting choice for the accelerator.
One of the first rule for information sharing is clarity. That’s why we knew we wanted to use a tool like Slack or Discord rather than Facebook groups of other Whatsappy-messaging-nonsence, that tend to mix up subjects and drown information.
Slack and Discord can be divided by rooms dedicated to one subject only. This allows more clarity and usages like muting a subject, or creating ephemeral ones.

We chose Discord because of its price policy and its community-based features.
At the begining, we were mainly attracted by the possibility to install a community radio on it, as we believed music to be a great social binder.
Also, voice chat feature seemed to be good advantage over slack.
Ultimately, Discord was a good choice, even though we miss Slack’s thread feature.

Regarding the file sharing tool, all members already used google drive, so it was an obvious choice. Sometime we use other collaborative tools such as Invision, Github or Figma.

For the Task managing tool, we will adress it in the Main focus section.

Small tweaks

Even if the main tool seemed tailored to our needs, we had to organize it, and tweak it, a lot.

We divided the chat into sections :

Here are some working mecanisms :

• Members are first directed to the #welcome channel, that is read-only and remind the concept and the rules ( like “don’t share anything you wouldn’t want you grandma to see”)

• Members are then urged to introduce themself in #present-yourself with a non-work related form we provide.

• Members can now navigate and participate everywhere (we have no private channels). They can consult descriptions and pinned posts to understand each channel’s purpose without needing help from other members.

Here are some channels and tips we use :

• #storm : A Crucial chan ! This is the ideal place to discuss a new idea, seek advice, opinion or constructive feedback.

• #discorvery : The place to share interesting links you find online, acting as a collaborative strategic intelligence.

• #1day1music : A channel to incentivize members to share music regularly.

• #we-love-memes : created to avoid memes invasions on other channels.

• Moving channels : If needed, we move very active chan, or urgent subjects in a more visible section.

• Ephemeral channels : For special events or “duty homework” (we’ll get into that soon), we don’t hesitate to create channels that will disapear or get archived.

Big issues and their solutions

Outside of work, I tried many times to keep in touch with people with the help of online groups, but most of the time it only lasted about 3 month, due to lack of motivation, purpose or commitment. I already knew these problem will occur :

To adress the Spam and Fomo problem, we used pedagogy and information :

• We reminded people that what some consider as spam or flood is what other consider spontaneity and joy of discution. After all, we are a club of creatives and not imune to the cliche of untidy people.
• We made tutorials on how to mute a chan, and a list of spam-risky rooms ( like #cuteanimals or #triviagame ).
• We tried to clarify that you don’t need to catch up on everything, coz we’re cool ! Relax.
• We decided to make monthly recaps to outline what’s been said, how projects are, and what novelty is coming to the Homies Mob.
• We asked every member to pray that Discord next update include a ripoff of Slack’s Thread feature !

Regarding the habit of sharing things online, we set up a simple points and levels gamification system, with the help of MEE6, a discord bot.

We have a #rank channel where we can see our points and ranks, go ego battles !

For each message you send, you get experience points that can unlock new titles for you.
Of course we created various funny title to motivate members to discover them all ( we kept most of them a mystery ).

Here are the first roles name. I guarrantee they become funnier after lvl 10 !

This play on the human motivation for uncovering the unknown, as well a natural drive for friendly competition.

Lastly, we tackle the motivation problem with what we call traditions.

We now propose a bimonthly and facultative tradition, that is sorted or voted for, between these three concepts :

• VideoBar : We make a videocall meeting at night and talk around hot beverages or cold beers. The idea is to meet new members, confront ideas and talk about ongoing matters. We use discord’s voice channels or google hangout. Of course if some members can meet in real life (IRL), it’s for the best.

• Pairing : Mini-Groups of two people are made randomly. They have to set up a one-on-one meeting, by phone, in real life or even in a videogame session. The idea is to get to know each other, get news, and talk shop, or not.

• Duty : Small individual homework to complete in a given time, and to share with the community. Those are sorted in a list made by members and administrators, and can reflect the needs of other members, or the current news.
  ( Here’s a duty example inspired by Spotify’s #YearWrapped : HommiesWrapped )

Of course we have other traditions like the Creative Room, a yearly weekend seminar where every member are convied to have fun, share discoveries and boost projects.

Main focus : the group’s projects

Let’s talk about the main topic of the accelerator, projects to boost and how to do so.

We saw that conversation and knowledge sharing happend naturaly on the chat, but we needed more action-oriented discussions.

That’s why we created the PROJECT section, that contains channels for each project, and is amongst top sections to remain visible.

One of the top channel in PROJECT is #my-project, which serves as a reminder for member : they can ask a moderators to add their project channel whenever they want.

The issue now becomes a series of questions we got :

• How to follow every project progress ?
• How to know who works on what ?
• How to present this project to other people in my network ? Is it even allowed ?
• What’s the link to this project’s site ? And that project’s spreasheet ?

This is why we decided to create a file (using our favorite task manager, Trello ) that shows all the project and their main info.

All project existing in the discord PROJECT section are here. We even added M&T and The Homies Mob ( how meta ?!)

Here are infos members can find on that board :

Yep, we speak french-glish

Each project is also granted these cards to dig in :

• PITCH : A pitch for each project that follows the same template. A good exercice to clarify what you do, how you do it, and of course who is it for.

• MARKETING : All other pitch, wording bites and arguments are gathered here with promotional images, logos and even analogies to use. This helps other talk about your project.

• LINKS : This is where the magic happens. All links concerning the project live here : Website url, social media pages, press kit … but also working documents ( Google Drive fils, Github repositories, Trello boards ). The aim is to allow other Homies to help, catch up, read over, and comment and maybe more.

• SALADE D’IDEES : This is yet another place you can leave an idea for a project, even if it’s not yours.

• NEXT UP : And finaly, this card shows last task completed, and next task to do for each project. Some people already had their task manager so they linked it here, other just update a status now and then. Most users use the checklist function inside the card and the project macro vision lives here !

The aim is to spread information equaly amongst members, and to serve newcomers during the onboarding phase.

If members forget to update a project, moderators will do it (when they get the info).

To get a sense of momentum, we set up the first chan in PROJECT as #activity, a channel ruled by a bot which posts messages everytime a file is modified or a task is updated, thanks to Zapier automation tool.

Concerning working documents, each project can work as its initiators wish, but we suggest a single document in a collaborative tool, when possible. We provide storage space, and a template called the bible. Yep, the bible.

Delight

With all those systems to design, we had little time to think about delighting our community members with nice usage details.
We explored a few ideas :

I may have missed some, but we do so much for the Homies .

Results and next steps

We are very proud of this community we’ve built during the past year and a half :

The traditions are a great engine for community interactions, and it keeps the chat active. Surprisingly, the gamification system also works wonders, even if there is nothing to win except domination over others.
Monthly recaps of project progress and meetings in real life are also great assets.

Our next steps are :

• Recruitment : Is word-of-mouth and invite-only enough ? What if we open canditatures to everyone ? Or what if we used derived techniques such as constest or games to find out new talents ?

• Monetisation : Money was never the point, but some expanses like events are growing. A small yearly membership could do the trick. A patreon system ? Donations of fans ? Nested Projects could also give back a small percent of their gains, to help other projects. We need a model that sustain itself.

• Onboarding : Welcoming a new member is tedius, and we feel that we sometime lose some of them because of the apparent complexity of a new tool like Discord, paired with the information overload of seeing all nested projects at the same time. Even the various topics discussed on the chat could make anyone dizzy. How to welcome people the right way ?

• Communication : It’s time to spread the world, especialy now that we have finished projects that need audience. What stategy will we use ? Can M&T speak about nested projects without having to teach its audience about the Homies Mob accelerator and how it works first ?

Testimonials

I asked members the two following questions :

• What problem is the Homies Mob solving for you ?
• What adjectives would you use to describe the Homies Mob ?

and got the following answers :