community-health

name	community-health
description	Evaluate community health through member value, participation quality, contributor concentration, responsiveness, retention, safety, sentiment, moderation burden, and operator sustainability rather than size alone.

Community Health

Use when deciding whether a community is becoming healthier, stagnant, fragile, or costly to sustain.

Procedure

1. Define the community's purpose and the member outcomes that indicate it is serving that purpose.
2. Track active participation by meaningful behavior, not only visits, membership, or total messages.
3. Measure contributor distribution and dependency on staff or a tiny set of super-users.
4. Examine response rates and time, unanswered questions, peer-to-peer help, event or program participation, and newcomer activation as relevant.
5. Review retention and re-engagement by cohort while accounting for natural seasonality or campaign-driven spikes.
6. Monitor moderation load, conflict, spam, reports, safety issues, and whether norms remain understandable as the community grows.
7. Combine quantitative patterns with member feedback and operator observations, keeping anecdote separate from population evidence.
8. Identify the few health risks that require intervention and the member behavior or system change expected to improve them.

Decision rules

• Community size and community health are different metrics.
• A healthy community should not depend entirely on staff generating conversation.
• High message volume can signal conflict or noise rather than value.
• Moderator and operator sustainability is part of health.

Quality gate

The assessment is ready when member outcomes, participation quality, contributor concentration, retention, safety, and operator burden are visible, metric changes have plausible interpretation, and recommended actions target specific health risks rather than generic engagement growth.