Journal
Blog · Rokuse LLC.
All articles
Community Terms of Service and Guidelines — Minimum Required Rule Design
Clarifying the roles of terms of service (hard rules) and community guidelines (soft rules), with the minimum items to prepare when launching a community and how to design them.
Community Purpose Design — Moving Beyond "We'll Figure It Out as We Go"
This article identifies three symptoms that emerge when a community lacks a clear purpose, and presents a four-axis framework for structuring purpose design around Who, What, Why, and By When.
Making Your Code of Conduct Actually Work — Beyond Just Posting the Document
We explain how to move from a CoC that sits on a page to one that functions through three operational loops — onboarding, violation response, and periodic review.
Affordance and Community Design — Creating a Space Where Members Naturally Do the Right Thing
Applying the design psychology concept of "affordance" to community design to create an environment where members naturally take desired actions.
Community Event Design — A Template for Maximizing Participant Satisfaction
A systematic guide covering everything from event planning and facilitation to post-event follow-up, helping community operators increase participant satisfaction and repeat attendance.
Bonding vs. Bridging Communities — Design Guidelines from a Social Capital Perspective
Drawing on Robert Putnam's Social Capital theory, this article explains the two community archetypes — Bonding and Bridging — and provides design guidelines for deciding which to lean toward (or how to combine both) in your own community.
Dunbar's Number and Community Scale — What Changes After 150 Members
What does the anthropologist Robin Dunbar's cognitive limit of roughly 150 stable relationships mean for community operation? This article explains the operating "OS" that must change at each threshold — 150, 1,500, and 15,000 members.
Stay a Small Village, Run It Like an Open Town — Keeping a Community Alive Through Circulation
A community's "size" and "flow" are two separate axes. Keep the size small like a village, but run it like a town with people coming and going — protect psychological safety and density while keeping the community alive through circulation, explained with the analogies of a river, a hot spring, and metabolism.
Measuring Community "Temperature" — Engagement Intensity Over Raw Numbers
Applying Csikszentmihalyi's flow theory to community operations. Instead of post counts or MAU, learn to design for participant immersion — the right information volume, participation thresholds, and the "turbulent stream" feeling that keeps members coming back.
Community Launch Costs and Monthly Operations Budget Guide
A practical breakdown of community launch and operations costs — from initial setup through monthly expenses. Covers scale-based estimates, in-house vs. outsourced comparisons, and hidden costs you'll likely overlook.
What's the difference between community "development" and "management"? — Why we are developers
Using a real-estate metaphor to distinguish "community management" from "community development," explaining that our role is that of a developer, not a property manager — with the three-step process and two entry points behind the service.
How to Spot a Bad Community Management Agency — A Vendor Selection Checklist
Avoid post-contract regret. A practical guide to recognizing failure patterns in community management outsourcing, with a 10-point vendor selection checklist.
How to Create the "First Speaker" — Five Techniques for Breaking Silence
The "nobody is posting" state right after a community launch is a design problem. This article explains the self-reinforcing structure of silence and gives five reproducible techniques to overcome it.
Designing Community Guidelines That Guide, Not Forbid — Wording Patterns That Change Behavior
When community guidelines fail to be followed, the cause is usually not missing items but the wording itself. We cover five principles for steering toward desired behavior instead of forbidding, plus a copy-paste NG/OK comparison set.
5 Things to Clarify Before Requesting Community Support
Five practical areas to organize before consulting an external community partner — so your first meeting is concrete, not vague. Includes an interactive pre-consultation worksheet.
The "Just-Right Buzz" in Community — The 70% Rule
Why the impulse to "make it more lively" can backfire, explained through three independent theories — queuing theory, flow theory, and the community temperature function. Optimization, not maximization, is the real goal.
The Difference Between Community and Association — Organizing the Concepts of Shared Body and Society
We explain the distinction between "community (shared body)" and "association (society)" defined by sociologist MacIver, and — drawing on the Cabinet Office's Social Capital survey — provide criteria for deciding which side to lean toward in your own initiatives.
Things to Decide Before Starting a Community That Is Not "Purpose-First"
We explain how to launch a community starting from fundamental human motives and interests rather than business KPIs, and offer three self-questions for putting your theme into words.
Expressing Community Operation in Code — Implementation Patterns for Policy, Moderation, and Invite Flows on Slack
We explain implementation patterns for declaratively managing operational policy, moderation, and invite flows in code on top of Slack. We show concrete file structures, automation designs, and a phased adoption path for moving from person-dependent operation to a reproducible system.
The Idea of "Community Development" — A Theory of Programmable Community Design
This article reframes community operation from a person-dependent act of "nurturing" to an object of "development" that can be structured, modularized, and improved iteratively, like software. It covers the thinking behind programmable community design and how to balance it with organic qualities.
Chasing MAU Kills Communities — On Leading, Intermediate, and Lagging Indicators
If you only chase lagging indicators like MAU and post count, you'll notice the problem too late. This article explains how to catch community health early using a three-layer KPI tree of leading, intermediate, and lagging indicators.
Three Things to Decide Before Launching a Corporate Community
We unpack the root cause of why "communities started on a vague impulse" fail, and explain the three things to nail down before launch — purpose, audience, and business connection.
The Real Reason "Buzz" Disappears — Sparse and Crowded Are the Same Disease
A community feeling "flat" and a community where "the timeline moves too fast to follow" look like opposite symptoms, but they share the same root cause. This article explains how to diagnose your own community through the lens of spatial density (ρ).
Types of Communities and How to Choose — Five Patterns Organized by Purpose
We classify communities into five patterns by purpose and clearly explain the criteria for choosing the type that fits your company.
How to Choose Community KPIs and Tips for Running Them — Five Representative Indicators and Their Pitfalls
We organize the KPIs to track in community operation across five views — scale, activity, relationships, business contribution, and operational health — and explain how to choose them and the pitfalls to watch in operation.
How to Plan a Podcast — 5 Steps to Decide Before Launch
The five things — purpose, audience, theme hierarchy, format, and release design — that you must decide before launching a podcast, explained from a practitioner's perspective.
TiedWorkspace
A case study of "TiedWorkspace," an invite-only community for experienced CTOs and VPoEs, organized from a community-design perspective.
ひろしま人会 (Hiroshima Jinkai)
A design-perspective case study of "ひろしま人会" (Hiroshima Jinkai), a community that uses a regional shared context as the foundation for natural dialogue and lasting relationships.
Practical Tips for Making a Podcast Work as a Community Initiative
How to keep audio content from being one-off and turn it into ongoing community dialogue — a structured walkthrough of the operational points from planning through retrospective.
Why Community Operations Need Context Design First
Before adding more initiatives, define the context, paths, and operating rhythm your community needs. This article explains, from a practitioner's perspective, why context design comes first.
How to engage Rokuse — the process from first inquiry to implementation
A practical guide to engaging Rokuse LLC. for community operation or content production work, broken down by phase — intake, proposal, contract, and kickoff. Written for readers thinking "I'd like to commission work."
Shikokairou (思考回廊)
A case study on producing the talk show "思考回廊" — covering technology, organization, and management themes — and the post-release activation work that turned it into ongoing community discussion.
Somarinsanna (染まりんさんな)
A case study on the regional-community podcast "染まりんさんな" — from planning design through the post-release dialogue path.
Podcast Production Workflow — The Full Process from Planning to Ongoing Operations
A practitioner's walkthrough of the full podcast production process, broken into six stages — planning, recording prep, recording, editing, release, and ongoing operations and improvement.
What does community support actually involve? — Inside Rokuse's community support service
A concrete walkthrough of Rokuse LLC.'s community support service — the menu of offerings, how engagements run, and how we think about scope — written for those evaluating it for the first time.
About Rokuse LLC. — Who We Are and What We Do
An overview of Rokuse LLC.'s services, mission, and why we combine community operation with content production — written for those encountering us for the first time.