This week in community building — Issue 136

☀️ It's very sunny in Rosieland today. When there is sun and no rain, that means there are no rainbows!

☁️ Ponder of the week

I'm pondering the fact that perhaps one of the greatest opportunities we have is to rebuild companies as communities.

⬇️ The downturn

The lows are coming for many startups, Clubhouse included as several core people within their team have left. However, there's some good prediction and insights on Clubhouse. Technically and audio speaking, the product is probably ahead of the likes of Twitter Spaces and Discord.

Much of my problem with it, for me, is being bombarded with lots of irrelevance. Remove the irrelevant spaces, the hype, and the annoying notifications and I may actually consider using it if it can provide a safe space for my community.

If you're looking for a job, check out the Rosieland job board.

Crypto is also currently taking a huge downward dip ️⬇️, this post on predatory community is worth a read.

They later find out that the “all-female led project” created by “Cindy”, “Kelda”, and “Andrea” was in fact created by a group of three white men.

Personally, I still just cannot bring myself to do anything web3 related. Every time I comment on the negativity of web3 there is always someone popping up to protect it. Which is fine. I would do the same for my 'community industry'. However I also think it's important for people to see that there are people who are not into crypto, it's so easy to believe that everyone is into it when there is so much hype.

❤️ Sticking with the heart of community practice

You can’t build or own community—I like to remind myself about this kind of perspective when building community.

I’m not sure if I entirely agree with it, but at the same time I don’t really disagree.

I think in my mind I think more in terms of ‘you can’t own community’. I feel like I’ve created conditions to build community in the past, I just don’t own it.

You can’t make someone love you.
You can’t force respect.
You can’t mandate care.
And you can’t build community.
Please be careful with talk of building community.
Community is a consequence of many contextual relationships intertwining over time, more like a meadow than legos.

Nora Bateson

The above comes from David Gurteen's Conversational Leadership Blook, I discovered it recently and it's a total gem!

🎟 IRL events are hot topic atm!

Events are not community, but the best events (imhro - in my humble rosie opinion) are community driven events.

Nathan Barry talks about the value of events for careers. Brian Morrissey shares some good event advice. Over on our Twitter Community Jeremy Fojut asks if there is a future for networking only events. Then Beth Vanderkolk asks how to track the success of events.

And on the topic of events, here are two worth looking at:

• Building Belonging Community Conversation. I'll be there and Laure is ace!
• Community Unconference led by James Cattell who is also awesome!

Other good reads for this week:

• Magic on WhatsApp: A Case Study by Nivi Achanta
• The five principles: safety and support form Hugh Lashbrooke

📚 Book find of the week

• Design for belonging by Susie Wise.

🐦 Tweets of the week