I started a few LinkedIn groups awhile back to allow people interested in venture to connect without being constrained by LinkedIn’s requirement that two people have a mutual contact in order to connect. Some of those groups are the regional venture communities listed on my blog - you can find links to them below.

New York Venture Community
Silicon Valley Venture Community
New England Venture Community
Southern California Venture Community
Southeast Venture Community

LinkedIn recently launched discussion features, making its groups more functional. There is pent up demand for this feature, as demonstrated by the fact that members of these communities are already starting to actively post job openings, upcoming events and other topics related to the respective group. The communities are communicating.

However, I think LinkedIn could make these discussion platforms function a bit better.

The first problem is that new discussion topics or comments on existing topics are somewhat hidden from group members. There are three ways a user can discover new conversations: 1) by scrolling down their ”Network Updates”, a feed listing all of the activity on the profiles of connections or within groups, 2) visiting the group page directly or 3) reading activity summary emails. It would be nice to have an option to receive an email every time there is a post. This would help us keep up to date on the groups we follow.

The second issue is that not all group interaction is captured on the discussion board. When I post a new topic, comments are both posted and emailed to me. If I respond to the email version of the comment my response is only sent to the person commenting – that part of the conversation is not added to the discussion board. This system facilitates a conversation flow that is outside of the discussion group – excluding the rest of the community from the dialogue.

The discussion features are a step in the right direction, but they need to do a bit more to get it right.