This week in community building — Issue 53

Hey everyone.

☁️ Lots of interesting things this week! ☁️

I’m tweaking how I do this newsletter as I go:

• this curated newsletter will go out every Monday
• on Tuesdays we have meetups, RSVP here.
• the articles will now go out on Wednesdays
• anyone up for experimenting with casual audio chats? (If you are on Android I can get an invite by email sent to you).

We don’t do that here

By Aja Hammerly

This is when I pull out “we don’t do that here.” It is a conversation ender. If you are the newcomer and someone who has been around a long time says “we don’t do that here”, it is hard to argue. This sentence doesn’t push my morality on anyone. If they want to do whatever it is elsewhere, I’m not telling them not to. I’m just cluing them into the local culture and values. If I deliver this sentence well it carries no more emotional weight than saying, “in Japan, people drive on the left.” “We don’t do that here” should be a statement of fact and nothing more. It clearly and concisely sets a boundary, and also makes it easy to disengage with any possible rebuttals.

The Future of Community Online

By Co-matter

Check your Pulse #51

Thoughts on trust, presubscribe, why curators are the new creators. By Sari Azout

Schools charging $50,000/year or more (Brown, NYU) have value propositions that have been rendered untenable overnight. The elimination of the university experience is similar to SeaWorld without killer whales. Yeah, we get it … free Willy, but I’m not paying $450 to see otters and penguins. Also, we’re not paying $54,000 for Zoom classes.

With the forced adoption of online learning, professors are realizing they can build online learning communities, broadcast their classes online to more people, make more money, and make students happier.  

The Membership Guide

Journalism needs solutions to its trust and revenue problems. Membership is one of them. Explore experiments around the world and learn how to apply their lessons in your newsroom today.

And more…

• Toward a Zoom agreement - Seth Godin
• Host a conference in Reddit — /r/AskHistorians/
• CMX 2020 - CMX Hub
• How to be helpful online — Ned Batchelder
• Virtual Teams That Work Creating Conditions for Virtual Team Effectiveness — Cristina B. Gibson, Susan G. Cohen
• Community Builders Summit 🗓
• Building for Creators: Are Community Tools the New Panacea? — Togetherness
• Distance Resistance — A Facebook group dedicated to fostering human connection in the face of social distancing
• Designing a better virtual conference - how to get people excited for a big online event! — Tony Bacigalupo 📺
• Creating Content Communities — Andy Johns
• Issue #27: Feeling Our Way Into the Future of Belonging — Future of Belonging
• 19 families buy nearly 97 acres of land in Georgia to create a city safe for Black people — Pamela Kirkland, CNN
• Post-Pandemic Transformation: Building a Mutualist Future — Marina Gorbis
• The Unreasonable Effectiveness of the QS Show&Tell — Gary Wolf
• Why is it so hard to get people to network on slack? — Niklas Lohmann 🎧
• Roots for advocates: applying community organising principles to developer relations — Ben Greenberg
• DevRel Metrics with Mary Thengvall — CHAOSS 🎧
• EP15: Turning a Community Side Project into a Successful Business w/ Allison Esposito — Masters of Community
• The feed is the new gallery — Ana Andjelic
• How to Start a Brand New Online Community, Even Without Technical Experience — Jono Bacon
• Creator Communities & Virtual Worlds — Jax
• Commentary: Are our neighbourhood chat groups starting to be a pain? — CNA

From Twitter