📘Glossary

Interaction: Interactions are conversations between community members. Specifically every mention of someone, reply or emoji reaction is counted as an interaction. Messages without these features are posts.

Posting: Every message in your community is a post. But not every post is counted as an interaction.

Active and Inactive Member types

Active members are members who post at least once during a selected time frame. The active member group has several subcategories.

• Newly active: members who joined and start posting in the past 7 days.

• Still active: new joiners who keep on posting after two weeks.

• Consistently active: regulars members who posted weekly for at least 3 out of 4 weeks.

• Returned: members who used to be inactive, but who rejoined.

• Vital: This is a special consistently active member category counting how many super-connectors you have. These are members who are consistently active and have conversations with others. This means we only count messages that generate a reaction (reply or emoji reactions) from others. A member is a vital member if they have at least 5 interactions with at least 5 other members during a week, and keep up this behavior for at least 3 out of 4 consecutive weeks.

Became disengaged: those active members who have not posted anything during the past 2 weeks.

Joined: members who joined in the last 7 days.

Community Health Metrics

Decentralization shows how much conversations depend on one (or very few) key members. Influence exists in a continuum between:

• Too spread: everyone regularly talks with everyone . Members manage too many relationships and are involved in too many divergent topics. Everyone’s voice is heard and included, but the community can struggle to define its direction and make progress.

• Too concentrated: a few core people engage with everyone, but other members don't talk to each other. The community is dependent on these key influencers, and its vision is only shaped by their opinions. This allows for speed but at the cost of buy-in and hence resilience

Learn more about this metric here

Fragmentation shows how much members are divided into informal cliques as a continuum between:

• Too fragmented: the community is very divided. It no longer feels like one community but rather multiple, smaller disconnected siloes. This leads to a lack of collaboration and, if not addressed, diverging visions and values.

• Too enmeshed: the community is too dense and monolithic. It feels noisy and overwhelming. Likely, members are involved in too many repeating conversations about the same tasks/topics.