Documentation
Understanding the Orbit Model
The Orbit Model is a framework for building high-gravity communities. A high gravity community is one that excels at attracting and retaining members by providing an outstanding member experience.
This guide will cover four concepts that are important to understand the foundational ideas that power the framework and how the Orbit application works: Gravity, Love, Reach and Impact. 💜 🚀
- Gravity is the rate at which member involvement is changing - measured at the community level.
- Love is the measure of a member's level of involvement in the community.
- Reach is the measure of a member's sphere of influence and their degree of visibility and connectedness.
- Impact is the set of outcomes that happen thanks to the work and operation of the community.
For the full documentation of the Orbit Model as it powers the Orbit application today, visit the this page on GitHub. You can also check out orbit.love/model to see the latest version of the model. These changes are coming soon to the application 🚀
Gravity 🌪️
Gravity is a community-level metric that indicates the strength of your community’s network. The stronger the gravity, the more involved and connected your community members are.
One tension to keep in mind is how to grow a community without losing its values and the sense of connection between people—without losing its gravity.
We currently have a beta version of the Gravity report in the app. Let us know if you’d like access.
Learn more: https://orbit.love/model/gravity
Love 💜
Love is represented via a score for an individual member. This score is based on the commitment level and regularity of a member's activities. All members have a Love metric.
Some facts about love:
- The Love of a member changes gradually over time.
- Love is affected by both a member’s presence and commitment level in your community.
- A member’s love score dictates what their Orbit Level is.
Learn more: https://orbit.love/model/love
We’ll now look at some key concepts related to Love.
Presence
Presence is a measure of a community member's activity over a period of time.
It includes the frequency and regularity with which a member participates. Increasing presence is one way that a member can increase their love.
The best way to see a member’s presence is to check out the Member Activity by Source graph on a member’s profile.
Commitment
Commitment is a measure of a member's depth of involvement and level of leadership. Each type of activity a member does has a different level of commitment. Here are some examples below:
Activity Type | Commitment Type |
Organized a meetup | Active ownership |
Volunteered at a meetup | Active participation |
Attended a meetup | Passive participation |
Read the newsletter | Passive consumption |
The commitment level of an activity can be represented using activity weights in the Orbit app.
Activity Weights
Activity weights are used to indicate the impact of an activity type on your community. They help place members in respective Orbit levels and influence their Love score.
Activity weight range from 0 through 10.
- If there is an activity that does not represent an active member contribution, you can select a weight of 0.
- e.g. Opening a pull request is an indicator of active contribution, so we’ll assign it a weight of 7. Merging of a pull request does not reflect on the presence of the opener, so we’ll assign it a weight of 0.
To know the weights of the default activities used by your built-in Orbit integrations, click on Settings → Activity Types.
To modify the weight of an activity type, click […] Menu → Edit Activity Type.
This will bring up a modal where. you can edit the weight.
If you are looking for suggestions for weights of your custom activities, check out this table below:
Weight | Examples |
0 | Notes, Github Pull Requests merged |
Less than 1 | Twitter follows, GitHub stars, newsletter subscriptions |
1-3 | Chat messages, direct messages |
4-6 | Forum and social posts, support requests, GitHub issues raised |
7-8 | Original content submitted, attended an event, created a GitHub pull request |
9-10 | Organized an event, gave a presentation, attending planning meetings |
Orbit Levels
Orbit Levels are a tool for segmenting community members by how engaged they are, to help you give the right experience to the right people.
Each member is assigned an Orbit Level based on their ranking as determined by Love
Orbit Level | Name of Level | Characterized by |
4 | Exploring | Newcomers and passive observers |
3 | Participating | Casually involved regulars |
2 | Contributing | Active coordinators and volunteers |
1 | Leading | Trusted leaders and advocates |
Learn more: https://orbit.love/model/love/orbit-levels
Reach 🤝
Reach takes into account a member’s reputation, credibility, and degree of connectedness. Currently, reach in the Orbit app is measured by a member’s social following, but in the future we will be transitioning to a reach calculation that takes into account both internal community connections and external connections. Learn more: https://orbit.love/model/reach
Impact
A community can have an impact on many goals that the business deems important, such as sales, marketing, product, social impact, and more.
Learn more about what kind of impact your community can create and how to generate flywheels in all areas of your business: https://orbit.love/model/impact
Further Exploration
For the full documentation of the Orbit Model as it powers the Orbit application today, visit the this page on GitHub. You can also check out orbit.love/model to see the latest version of the model. These changes are coming soon to the application 🚀
Are you curious about how the Orbit team uses the Orbit Model in our own work? Read this blog post on the ways we use our own model to power the Orbit community.