This is the second in a series of posts about usability and user experience for building online communities. The first post talked about the engagement snapshot. In this post, I want to talk about creating subgroups, again using YAP as case study.

We always talk about how community happens in small groups. Small groups do not splinter a community at all, in fact quite the opposite – a growing, vibrant community is the aggregate of a whole bunch of reasons for people to interact with each other and to find connection nodes. The best way to nurture an engaged community, therefore, is to encourage the creation of small groups and to make it easy for them to happen. All members of an online community should be able to create groups on their own.

Here’s a snapshot of YAP’s featured groups (we have a lot more than this too).

A caveat – do not make the mistake of pre-filling your community with all of your internal committees and councils and task forces and whatever. Some “real life” groups will have zero interest in working in your online space at first, particularly if they already have a perfectly good way of working – even if it’s seemingly awkward, like through traditional email communication. If it works for them, they will have no interest in using the online community, and there’s nothing more depressing when browsing through a community than groups with no activity or dormant groups.

You can however encourage groups to form. If you have a national/international group like YAP, wait, for example, to see if you have a bunch of people from the same geographic location who might want to connect with each other. Equally, if you have an idea for a particular group based on some area of interest, make an announcement to the entire community that you’ll be setting it up and you hope people will join. Also, you should always take advantage of the buzz around any real-life event like an annual conference to create a group around it where people could arrange to meet up, post pictures, or start discussions relating to the event. And it’s absolutely fine to encourage private groups too – those that are completely hidden, as well as those that are visible but by invitation only. Your goal is to have more and more people using the site, and eventually to cross pollinate groups with relevant content from other groups just by virtue of people knowing all the good things that are happening (even if they need to request to join a particular committee or whatever).

Subgroups should be allowed to grow – and die – organically. Some may be created for the specific purpose of working on a time-specific project – and once it’s over, it’s perfectly fine to “retire” it. Same goes for that group about the meet-up at the conference in 2004. Hide dormant groups, but highlight those with a lot of activity, new groups you want to promote, or those simply with something really interesting going on. A good community manager should be able to spread the word about interesting discussions or activity happening in certain groups that the whole community should know about.

Small groups are the glue that holds community together. Make it easy for them to happen organically.