The world changes. We change. Our needs change.
I started Rosieland in 2020, that wonderful start of the pandemic year. It feels like a life time ago. Starting this space for me really was about making a commitment to going deep into the community building. I started with a weekly roundup newsletter and then started to find the confidence to write.
I still publish every week. Usually a curated newsletter plus an article. I've never managed to get ahead of schedule, yet I've mostly kept to the schedule of writing an article every week for four years. I've taken a few 1-2 weeks breaks here and there, but pretty much I've just kept going.
I realise I have to embrace the fact that I will likely never articles planned out weeks in advance. The ADHD person in me works to deadlines, and to me that is to ship something every week. And then my Autistic self loves the routine of research and writing. Something always feels out of place if I don't show up to do my thing. I go in a bit tired, and then come out energised. I say and try to find ways to communicate the me within all of this because I don't like to encourage hustle culture, I'm trying to make sense of what works for me.
As times have changed, as my life has changed too, I've been trying to think about what it is this space should be for me. What have I learned about myself? Where would I feel happiest going forward? Where do I feel like I can give value?
Alongside this, the feedback I've been given time and time again is that I help people see things in a different way. I find ways to talk about things. Create new ideas, names, frameworks and perspectives that help people see how community can be. And perhaps a contributing factor is that I also don't have time for community bullsh*t and the things that don't help community truly move forward.
I find that the people who stay are continuously curious. They realise there is a lot available within Rosieland and they work through it at their own pace. A little bit at a time.
And it is this what excites me the most. To continue doing that work. To place value on creating a place of community curiosity.
Thinking about subtle changes
For those that live in the 'creator' type world, it is one of continuous pressure to offer services and products to achieve a certain level of living. Courses. Coaching. Cohorts. Consulting. Community. And then package them up and put our sales-y hat on to sell them. I've come to the conclusion I want none of that.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with any of these models. I've just decided that they aren't for me. The work required to do those things is not the work I want to do.
I've also grown tired of people expecting solutions handed to them, yet really it is their own willingness to be curious that will help them find the way forward with their own challenges.
In addition to this I've become very uncomfortable with AI and all the scraping of content. Of course there are benefits to this, but for now, I'd rather protect my work at Rosieland from the AI scraping bots and how they might use it. The ethics around AI are most definitely questionable, and (you may or may not know) I love to be stubborn with my ethics, for better or worse!
I've now put almost all my content behind a paywall. I battled with this decision for months, but it feels good now that I've committed to it. What I create doesn't exist anywhere else, it is years of work and I want people that appreciate and can learn from it to be in the room.
Nothing I share will ever give you the exact answer you need. However, what I do hope is that I can help you be curious to find the path you need to follow. You have to do the work to find what actually works for you, but Rosieland can definitely help find your way in a way that would save you a whole bunch of time too.
What feels more authentic to me is to provide a space that supports people to be curious about community and to have supporting points along the way.
What is Community Curiosity as a Service?
Community Curiosity as a Service is a mindset.
The things I do always have a way of evolving through emergence. In reality, not much is changing at Rosieland, at least for now. I'll be tweaking and adapting as I go with community curiosity at the heart.
Sometimes it's just me being curious and sharing everything I know. Other times it is being casually community curious together, in whatever way we feel energised to do so.
There are almost 500 pieces of content I've created to explore. Some of it is organised into a Learn section, others in a Guides section. It will always be a bit quirky and imperfect. It is a work in progress, but there's plenty there to tap into your curiosity.
Just like people teach through a course, coaching or consulting. I teach and help people become community curious through regular bitesize articles. Through regular sharing of thoughts. And asking as many questions as many as I answer.
It is just as, if not more, valuable than traditional type learning. I'd even go as far as saying it is the only way I've ever done deep learning.
Every article that I write is what I'm thinking or doing about right now in community. I'm actually really excited about what I'm working on, and feel like how we are doing it isn't being talked about anywhere else. My current writing is almost like building in public, but perhaps with a more emphasis on 'thinking in public'. I love to share the thinking about how I believe communities can be built.
I find it hard to not to write about what and how I'm doing community right now. My writing aims to get stuff out quickly. The ideas are not always perfectly formed, but by getting them out they exist to help you all become community curious. In time they will emerge into more refined and edited resources, but those seem to take me ages to do. 😅
There are the weekly Roundups to help you discover delightful and random community from across the globe. Sometimes these form the basis of new ideas, or are simply a way to share the interesting work of others.
There is the Knowledgebase that is full of ideas, resources, snippets, podcasts, books...a lot of this knowledgebase is actually where I save everything from the Roundups.
I've tagged everything to try to make better sense of it all too.
I collect ideas, frameworks and models. It's my hobby! 😅
I make notes in the form of Snippets.
I spot interesting words and started a community dictionary as a result.
There is more, and it is forever evolving.
Then there is the Slack, which is pretty low key these days after dealing with yet another community migration. 🙄 My goal these days is to keep it minimalistic, share interesting community things and for it to be a point of contact for each other. It's been a great instigator for me to finally catch (virtual video chat) up with individuals from the community. The door is always open.
I've dipped in and out of doing events and community chats, I'd really love to get back into that in a way that will support our emphasise curiosity. Probably in the form of unscripted conversations with intention.
Having a Community Curiosity as a Service mindset means I will continue to explore ways of pulling together all the community knowledge to be more helpful to my readers. I have many ideas around this which I will share as they happen!
Curiosity is the future!
I've said it before and I'll keep saying it again. The community industry is young and we have the opportunity to bring greater impact. We will laugh at ourselves in 10 years time at how we use to do stuff.
We have to change the way we've been doing things. There are always better ways. I'm finding better ways for my own situation (at Ministry of Testing). I am still curious and willing to adapt and iterate everything we do.
We all need to do that, create community change one curious iteration at a time. And I want to help you do that.
