This week in community building — Issue 135

🌈 This week I challenged myself to write some words around what I've found this week. It certainly forced me to process and learn better from what I read, which I think is only a good thing!

🙏🏽 Would you share the love and let me know what you think of the new format?

On social: I see all communication tools as community tools. Social media can be used for many things, community is one of them. This is a great guide to understanding what is going on in the social landscape.

On community trends: Social media trends sure do change quickly, but so does the business world. Simon talks about media companies pivoting back to free, I've started to see this happen in communities too.

My rosie-take is that the realisation is coming that finding the balance for sustainable communities is so hard and perhaps we need to build in multiple revenue streams to protect our existence. We certainly did this at Ministry of Testing (a community-driven business I founded).

On the heart of community: Elsewhere I feel people haven't quite realised that communities are often here to change the world we live in, for the better. I don't think any community can stay static. We can create new ways. New ideas. And put our own stamp on things.

The DeafBlind community has been doing just that with Protactile communication. It's a fascinating read. Community, exploration and education is at the heart of it.

"In time, the community replaced these A.S.L. words with words that felt more tactilely intuitive: “yes” became an affirmative patting, and “no” felt like a hand swiftly erasing a message from a whiteboard."

On conversations: As people who care so much about engagement, how much thought do you put into the conversations you have or facilitate with your people?

Can you pinpoint the last great conversation that you had? This is a short video worth a few minutes of your time that talks about conversation design principles how they should help people learn and understanding their world better.

The ingredients of conversation design principles being:

• humility: We must enter a conversation with deep humility to help each other fill in knowledge gaps, it should be mutual. We each have something to offer the other. Anyone can be your teacher.
• critical thinking: the ability and eagerness to identify gaps in logic or shortfalls in evidence-based arguments.
• sympathetic listening: are you really understanding the other person's perspective. Seek to understand why are they looking at the same world you are looking at and coming to a very different conclusion.

Personally,  I've had two great conversations recently. I loved the Community Design Twitter Space I hosted with Anna (go give them a follow). I also enjoyed and appreciated Rosieland's first community-led event, it was small but mighty as we explored ideas around Community Discovery.

On starting community: I recently wrote about Community Discovery, I'm going to go deep on this over the coming months. This has also naturally led me to reviewing and updating my thinking around Minimum Viable Communities. On the 'starting' topic, I also noted that Victoria Tran wrote about creating, finding and maintaining your first community.

🌶 The spicy take: DevRel != Community

☀️ I'm ending with some links worth peeking at:

• How the SCARF model of motivation helps to encourage community engagement — Laure Cast
• How to Create Great Onboarding for Your Online Community — Carrie Melissa Jones
• On Community Signal they cover recruitment and ethics, when would you turn down a job?
• Sharing the positives of web3 and the future of community 🏘
• Community management skills in other settings 🏘

👩🏽‍💻 Jobs

• Customer Support + Community Lead — SuperHi
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