Community should feel like a pinball machine, not a funnel

I spent some time recently reading about community building, and noticed that a lot of frameworks are unidimensional: they describe a single spectrum of "engagement" and rank people by where they are on this spectrum. The analogy that is often used is a funnel (or, equivalently a series of concentric circles). At the top of the funnel you have people who are aware of the community, in the middle…