About CommunityBot

CommunityBot is an experiment in expert bots and smart agents. We are interested to see how helpful an AI-powered bot, or agent, can really be. Initially the bot will be informational in nature - helping answer questions and providing useful information - but, as it develops, it will become more 'agent'-like i.e. be able to do things as well e.g. make introductions, book meetings etc.

CommunityBot was started by Ashley Friedlein  following the closure of Guild, a platform for professional groups, networks and communities which he had founded. Although the Guild business did not take off as hoped (more details on that in the second half of this podcast interview with Ashley), the team still believed in the power of professional communities to share and learn and also in the compelling nature of mobile messaging as a medium to engage and have useful conversations.

Then AI became a big thing so we want to see how a combination of AI-augmented knowledge sharing and networking could be brought into the medium of messaging via the likes of WhatsApp. Through Guild, and many years of creating high quality content and connections around how to build and manage successful online communities, it seemed obvious to take this as the domain of expertise for our bot as we have all the ingredients for the bot's training and expert knowledge base.

Sponsors

We're not yet sure what the business model for CommunityBot will be, if at all. But one obvious route would be to have the bot sponsored by supporters who want to build their brand, and generate leads etc, in the community sector.

Here are the kinds of benefits we think would be of value to sponsors:

  • Training the knowledge base with deeper / richer information on the sponsor e.g. products, services, key staff, contact details, history, articles, research etc (including a source credit with link where sponsor's content is used)  
  • A credit + link on this page
  • A credit + link in the CommunityBot WhatsApp group description
  • Some kind of outbound 'shout out' / message to users of CommunityBot

If you're interested in becoming a sponsor then contact Ashley Friedlein to discuss.

Contributors

We're keen to make CommunityBot a community endeavour - of the community, for the community. To do that we rely on experts and practitioners to help improve our bot, train it with ongoing community expertise and experience from community pros around the world. We'll keep adding to this list of contributors...

A big thank you to these community experts:

Jobs

If you're looking for a job, or hiring, in the community industry, following is a list of resources that have been recommended (we'll keep adding to these resources so let us know if you've got a helpful suggestion to add):

Dedicated community jobs boards:

Job site aggregators with community jobs: