This week in community building - Issue 40

🥳 Four-oh. Forty issues!

40 is just a number, but it matters to me. Some of my observations:

• I’ve been showing up every week
• I’ve been on the constant hunt for community resources
• I’ve been in community building 15 years, but there is still so much exciting stuff to see happen and learn from
• The challenge is we can learn about community from such a wide range of people, not just community builders. I’m still figuring this out.
• I’ve been experimenting and figuring out how to write and share about all of this, every week something changes with the aim to improve.
• I’m sticking with Substack as a newsletter tool
• I got rid of what was my blog as I found my head was in Notion most of the time, so my website is now a Notion instance, which also has a blog. Mind blowing? 🤯
  

Party in a shared Google Doc

This is genius. Community is how you bring people together, not with what you use.

How does it feel to be with someone and to know their presence not through their face, or voice, or a humanoid avatar, but just silently knowing which cell of a spreadsheet they just clicked on?

Breaking the ‘London Restaurant Industry’ Monopoly on the Old Kent Road

While well-known restaurants are pivoting to community engagement, the culinary panoply of Old Kent Road has been building its own communities for decades.

There’s an untapped market to use tech for local community building initiatives, imho.

Yet there is something happening on the street which defies what is happening to the wider London restaurant industry in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, which is that instead of looking to the government for guidance and contemplating their future, they have simply opened and remained busy. The Old Kent Road’s restaurants are not relying on a bail out; they are now relying on the communities to which they have made themselves indispensable.

WeWork + Community + Layoffs

WeWork in the UK are facing more layoffs with an emphasis on their community and customer service roles. I summarised the situation. 🤷🏽‍♀️

They are :

• spreading the community manager's super thin...
• Community managers use to love the vibe, but now they have lost faith in leadership..
• The appreciation of community managers by leadership has been lost...
• The WeWork coffee (culture) is more important than community...

The Youth Are Alright - TikTok Teens and K-Pop Stans Say They Sank Trump Rally

This brings me all kind of hope.

• social media can be used for good
• groups of people can make a difference
• can people use technology, community and social tech creatively to balance out negative uses that we’ve seen for the past few years?

Other community news...

• Moving Your Community Off of Facebook: Part 1 – Questions to ask yourself before you move your community off of Facebook – Noele Flowers
• This is How I Role: My Path To Finding A New Community Role – Holly Firestone
• 📖Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software - Nadia Eghbal
• The Loop, June 2020: Defining the Stack Community – The Stack Overflow Blog
• The Dash, and how it can help us build better communities. – Neil Cocker
• Mapping the Growing Ecosystem of Community Tools – Commsor
• 🎧 Miller Abel from The Gates Foundation on Building Financial Inclusion With Technology – Jono Bacon
• 🎧 A Talk about Racism, Privilege, and DevRel (Ep 48) – Community Pulse
• 🎧 Content curation vs algorithms - Community Finder
• 🎧 Engagement That Scales – Episode #12 – Charlene Li on the Difference Between Leading and Managing - The Community Roundtable

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