What would I do if I had to lead again an inactive community?

Context

This year I'm stepping down as the guy who pushes the Service Design Network Swiss Chapter. My goal was to bring it back to an alive state and then look for a leader who can kickoff the growth phase. That's exactly what is happening now.

So now I'm reflecting on what I've learned from these few years, and writing here what I would do if I wanted to do again such a challenge.

What I would do

I kind of love this idea that all what an inactive community needs is not a big strategy but just a pulse and beat for long enough which makes it attractive again for leaders interested in making communities grow further.

• Intervision to attract people who love to help: intervision is such a great format where people self organize, meet others and can help each other. Such a format is great to attract people who are not "consumers" but real community members who then can make projects happen.
• Events for awareness: events, especially remote events are such an easy thing to organize which creates awareness before, and that gives after content that can be shown to showcase how the community is active. Events attract a lot of "consumer" types of people. They have a lot of demands, but won't do much for the community. But the events help really for the awareness of the mission and the community.
• Stability and communication: on event per week, at the same day, at the same day, with a fixed and simple format (for example 30 minutes, 3 insights, 3 questions, and extra time for hangout) are perfect.
• Open call for leadership: Once this is all done for 3 years you'll have attracted a great group of people and also shown that taking over the community can be interesting. That's when you create an open call to lead the future of the community with a strong process to make it look like an honor if you "win the position"

Where I wouldn't put effort

The goal of such a process is not to create the perfect community and to serve every need. Instead to create enough of excitement and yet enough "holes" that people feel they could fix in a much better way than you do,

Therefore here are some of the things where I wouldn't put any effort:

• On site events: let others do the logisitics of this. It's too much work.
• Online community: people have already enough slack groups, forums, and stuff like that, and for your it's another inbox to manage.
• Governance, admin, etc: keep it simple, you are just bringing the community back to life, you are not managing it on the long term.