User Group Meetup 2026-Session 4: Project Circle

Video Transcription

Video Summary

The Circle project began after clients left Oasis for more community-focused learning platforms. Rather than immediately combining community and learning, the team created a new platform, <strong>The Commons</strong>, to test whether a more engaging community experience could work. <strong>Circle</strong> is the first community running on The Commons; it is not a replacement for Oasis.

The team hopes Circle will at least give Oasis users a place to connect, share ideas, and hear about product updates. It will also help test whether chat-based communities encourage more participation than traditional discussion forums. The platform includes chat rooms, discussion forums, resource libraries, direct messages, polls, member profiles, and public, private, or approval-based communities. It can run within Oasis or as a standalone platform.

The presenters stressed that the experiment may not succeed and asked users to try Circle and provide feedback. Community features are not yet deeply integrated with Oasis, though course-based communities are a possible future direction. Planned engagement improvements include email updates or digests; Oasis also displays badges for unread community activity.

Keywords

Circle

The Commons

Oasis

community platform

chat-based communities

discussion forums

user engagement