Almost a year ago, we announced that our community’s real time communications were migrating from IRC to Slack. As we pass 1,000 active users, we want to take a moment to give gratitude to our community for making it happen.

1,000+ active users

More than 450 of our users joined Slack in our first month and a half, an incredible lift for us. Read more about our first month of Slack on the blog.

We’ve grown consistently since then, but our next big influx of community came this week, when our Open Education Platform launched. #cc-openedu is now our most populous channel outside of #general and #announcements, with 167 participants collaborating daily in the channel. We expect an increasing number of people signing up in all our platforms with the launch of our exciting new Global Network Strategy.

Our community as a whole hosts 250 Weekly Active Users sending approximately 1,000 messages per day. However, certain days are definitely busier than others: after we sent out our invitation to our Global Summit attendees to join us on Slack, our engagement shot up to 1,700 messages in one day in April. The community is friendly and welcoming, and we try to say hello to every member who joins and posts!

35 Public Channels

35 public channels feels like a lot of channels, but the number of access points allows members to hop into (and out of) any of our global communities or programs with ease. The many channels allow us to open up our work to the world and facilitate communication between a variety of users on six continents. (We’re not yet in Antarctica – anyone want to start a chapter?)

In addition to our 1,000 members milestone, we’re nearing another important landmark: The CC Community has sent nearly 200,000 messages! We’re talking a lot between each other – more than 50% of our messages are sent via Direct Messages to develop our close-knit, relational culture of Community Builders.

To call out some of our favorite channels, #cc-openedu is acting as a catalyst and inspiration for other network-platform based communities, with more than 60 users regularly posting messages and a channel membership of 166. The #general and #announcements channels remain incredibly popular, with over 1,000 total members and 100 daily active users, as does, of course, #cc-animals, which provides all the cuteness from the commons. Want to learn more about how we work? #cc-culture-club has you covered! While most of our chatter is about the commons, we can also get silly in the #random channel.

We’ve also been excited to see the growth of users in global communities like #cc-europe, #cc-canada, and #cc-arabworld.

A vision for community growth

Our adoption of Slack has seriously grown our capacity as a network and as a community. We’ve been able to use the platform to chat, connect, and collaborate across disciplines. Through Slack, we’re privileging accessibility and community in order to reach our goals as a connected, growing network.

Our next steps include possible Slack chats, more fun, (like these Slack awards,) and frankly, who knows what else? Our community surprises us every day.

If you haven’t yet joined us, please do! We’d love to meet you.