What's Involved with Creating A Community on Carii?

Creating a Community on Carii.

In my previous post, "A Solution to the Problems with LinkedIn Groups" I covered why I feel the "Carii" platform has much to offer as an alternative to LinkedIn Groups for subject specific business communities. Feedback on that post highlighted that there is significant inertia to move away from LinkedIn Groups, especially as to try anything new involves time investment. A related issue is that we all have enough accounts already!

So if this new platform is to have anything to offer, it certainly needs to be intuitive and easy. As promised at the end of the aforementioned post, this morning I went through the steps of creating a Carii Community and recorded them. The first thing I noted, which is different from the last time I played around with groups on Carii, is that users can now log in via their social accounts. At least this means one does not have to remember yet another username and password, so that's definitely a welcome feature and removes one hurdle to uptake.

Having logged in, some orientation is needed to get used to the format. Having some familiarity already, I know that BYOC in the top right hand corner stands for "Build Your Own Community", but I'm not sure this shorthand will be obvious to newcomers. However, it does say "New Community" above this icon, so while not prominent, it seems clear enough?

Once I clicked on this, it bought up a form to fill in. I found everything to be straightforward, so I created a Community on the fly. I wasn't sure what the Community should be about, so as we're talking about alternative-to-LinkedIn websites for business, I focused my Community on that subject. Amongst the Community set-up settings I was asked to choose options, such as the Community web-address and various privacy settings. It took me a matter of minutes to fill in the required details.

Record of steps required to setup a Community on Carii.

The next step was to press the "Submit" button. Now, here I thought that this might mean the "submission" would have to go through some sort of approval process, but no, the Community was created straight away and I received a thankyou note and a little video about Carii. I  wonder therefore if "Create" would be more appropriate than "Submit"?

Anyway, it took me a lot longer to make the above image from the screenshots than go through the process! So far so good. As this was painless, I am encouraged to delve deeper into it. So next time, I will start looking into the mechanics of running and managing Communities on Carii. However, if you're feeling adventurous or, now I've set the forum up, are interested in alternative websites for business networking (or have one to promote!), then you can join the Community I created here:

"Websites for Business Networking"