Community Engagement Modeling

Over the past 4 years I have been thinking about how to get individuals involved with and participating within a community. It is not an easy thing to get a group of individuals comfortable with your site and each other to the point of participating and caring when they become a true community. While I will continue to learn, I wanted to share what I see as the phases to the development into a community and their participation. The core concept of the model is pretty simple. People need to build their trust and loyalty with a community before they will actively engage and care about it. This model proceeds through phases building on trust where interactions gradually increase in their threshold of interactivity. The five stages of the community engagement model are...