Live note taking β€” a value driven community build tactic

One thing I'm trying out these days is live note-taking at events we host at Orbit.

I'm still very much experimenting at the moment, but I thought I would go into my thought processes behind it.

Why take notes live?


In an age where we can record almost anything and even get near perfect and automated transcriptions, why would we even bother to take notes live? And what value does it even add?

I have a few thoughts and theories behind this:

  • Content overwhelm: we're overwhelmed with content, it feels like it has 100x'd since covid as everyone has pushed to go online for everything.
  • Audio and video can be very inefficient: hopefully, I'm not getting old and grumpy, but I find that so much video and audio content is full of fluff. Note-taking can cut through the fluff.
  • Creating focus: often I'll watch or listen to things and get distracted midway through, whether I'm taking notes or watching others do it, I feel it can help keep me focused.
  • Notes can be a taste of the full experience: I like to go on the assumption that we are all busy people. If I can help people save time, then I will. having a history of notes gives members, new and old, an idea of the type of content that is being shared. It may encourage them to take part, or not.
  • Notes are good habits for documentation and digital gardening: obviously, it depends how you take notes, but creating some kind of community process for notes to be taken is a great process for those who aspire to community gardening.
  • Notes that add humanity: note-taking isn't always just spitting out what people are saying, often they can come with additional ideas, persoal world views, thoughts, and knowledge.
  • Notes encourage people to participate: it's hard enough trying to encourage people to participate, taking notes is one additional way to encourage people to contribute. Whether as note-takers themselves or responding to notes people take.

How to take live notes?

Tools are not the problem. It's just about using them, imperfectly.

If you are in a Zoom session, encourage people to jot down ideas in the chat. If you'd like longevity, export the chat and find a home for it. Turn it into something else, a forum post, a blog post, a Twitter thread. Almost anything is better than nothing.

Google Docs is an amazing tool to just whip up, open up the permissions and share it. Encourage people to not only take notes, but say hi, add their contact details and also add comments. The beauty of Google Docs is that practically everyone is familiar with how to use it.

With Twitter Spaces you can also encourage people to post tweets, maybe with a hashtag for easy identification. I've also seen people do summaries of Twitter Space sessions as Twitter threads, either as an attendee or an organizer. At Orbit we've used Discord for taking notes of Twitter Spaces, really we should probably use both Discord and Twitter. I guess we will work towards that.

Make use of whatever tools you are using. At Orbit, we use Discord, so we've been taking notes there. We run a mixture of events, inside and out of our Discord. We started first by taking notes of just events within Discord, now we're expanding it to other events, as mentioned above, our Twitter Spaces. It's proving to be a way to pull people into our Discord community too.

Here's a sneak peak at some snippets of what it looks like right for our Community Built events.

We've also created a new space for all events we host, and for our week long Community Camp, we've created a temporary structure for it's existence. The intention here is to hopefully get people gathering, taking notes, and chatting over each individual talk.

The key, with all of this, is to experiment, with community intention

I have no idea how this will end up, but at the core of this is not some kind of specific marketing strategy. Everything I'm trying to do is create value for our community, in a manageable and conversational way.

Yes, we're leading this as a community initiative. We're taking the weight of the work, right now. In time, if it goes down well enough, it could become a core part of what and who we are as a community.

In time it may become a core part of what we do. It could become community-driven, volunteer and natural conversational driven. It could be supported and made to happen by a member of our team. Or we could even reward community members to do it for us.

In reality, if it continues to happen, it may be a whole mixture of the above.

Note-taking for Orbit, also aligns with the kind of values of who we are as a company. We're here to dive deep into the world of community building, in a thoughtful and productive way.

In reality, this is probably the start of something that will lead to other better ideas and ways of building community.

My mind starts buzzing around the potential of these kind of things.

Like, often we think of people to contributing to a community as people who can host, speak or write full on articles. All of those things are a big ask, they can take many hours of people's time. As community builders we need to find smaller, more bite-size, and less overwhelming ways for members to contribute to the greater good.

Note-taking is a great strategy for that.

✌️

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