With Waze’s popularity only increasing, its current model inevitably raises questions. The biggest one: Is the system sustainable? What happens when the most active editors no longer want to spend their free time maintaining the map and community?
In fact, in the past year, Waze’s editor pool has shown signs of stagnation while users have continued to boom. “Our focus is more on growing the driver base than growing the editor base,” says Julie Mossler, Waze’s head of global communications and creative launch strategy.
Despite the massive injection of Google cash, Waze doesn’t look to be supplementing the editors with extra help anytime soon, either. “On the employee side we really haven’t grown much since we were acquired,” Mossler says. “We know how to operate a really strong, lean team, and that’s not something we want to lose just because we have the ability to hire more.”
As I look more into online communities both paid and unpaid that drive changes to a product, the more of a fear I have about building a community only to lose it in an instant. It sounds like Waze is not putting in the effort to keep their community growing. I see stagnation with Open Street Map’s active users as well.
Building a community is incredibly hard. You have to illustrate your dream, generate an emotional connection between you and the dream so strongly that people will want to follow and cultivate this group into a workforce. It’s a bit easier if you’re giving them something for their time..a free service that enriches their lives and it’s even easier if you pay them.
One day, you’ll start seeing attrition among the higher ranks and even worse, no one stepping up to replace them. 1% of your users will take time to contribute feedback. 1% of that group will contribute 90% of the feedback. It’s easy for it all to crumble. When Google bought Waze, I thought the top contributors would have stopped on day one. “They have Google now and they do’t need us” but it’s been a year and thousands still contribute to Waze.