This week in community building — Issue 77

Shared (un)Realities

By Om Malik

“Our shared realities become the world we live in and know: Sharing is believing. And with tight networks of people talking just to each other, these shared realities are the DNA of our social bubbles … With no shared reality being created, the interaction is treated as meaningless. It is as if the other person doesn’t matter or doesn’t really exist. Given our strong, natural motivation to create shared reality with other humans, not doing so when interacting with members of an out-group is like treating them as being non human. We want to create a shared reality with members of our in-group but not with members of out-groups.

A tactical guide to kickstarting your community

By Patrick Woods

Theory is great, and I love a good community framework, but sometimes you just want to hear the specifics of what people did. The nuts and bolts, the nitty-gritty details.So in the spirit of learning in public, here's how we bootstrapped our initial community.It ain’t perfect, but it’s something, and I hope the specific tactics and details will help others get their community flywheel spinning

Your Voice Is My Favorite Sound

By Tim Leberecht

“From phone calls to messaging and back to audio — the way we use our phones may be coming full circle,” Tanya Basu writes in the MIT Technology Review. And tech analyst Jeremiah Owyang considers social audio the “Goldilocks Medium”: “Text social networks are not enough, video conferencing is too much, social audio is just right.” (Check his list of “20 ways businesses will engage social audio”).

✍️ Articles:

• A tactical guide to kickstarting your community — Patrick Woods
• The DevRel Path To Success: Awareness, Enablement, Engagement — Mary Thengvall
• #37: Community, mob, fandom, or cult? — Haley Nahman
• 7 Essential Steps to Build A Cult. — The Party Scientist
• Frameworks for Governance, Incentive and Consequence in FOSS — Emma Irwin
• Trust — Sascha Mombartz
• Social audio takes us back to an exciting future. — Tim Leberecht
• How n8n builds an amazing product together with their community — Frank Lagendijk and Steven Aanen
• Community-Led Growth is taking tech by storm — Hal Koss, Built In
• Community and Marketing have a natural overlap. Uncommunity #17 — Uncommunity
• 🗓 Campfire Chat with Charles Vogl — Hosted by Danielle Maveal
• 📕 Shared Reality: What Makes Us Strong and Tears Us Apart — E. Tory Higgins
• 📘 The Business of Belonging: How to Make Community your Competitive Advantage — David Spinks

🗞 News

• “Black creativity and community made Clubhouse the destination it is.” — Marker
• TikTok rolls out new commenting features aimed at preventing bullying — TechCrunch
• Capsule gets $1.5M to build ‘super simple’ decentralized social media — TechCrunch
• Kind Boundaries: for Calls, Speaking, Books and Intellectual Property — Carrie Melissa Jones

🎧 Podcasts & Videos

• How One Community Builder Increased Meaningful Member Engagement from 5% to 42% — Carrie Melissa Jones
• Casper ter Kuile and Vanessa Zoltan launches a new podcast — The Real Question.
• Has Community Marketing Lived Up To Its Hype? With Christina Garnet‪t‬ — The Over Thinkers
• DesignX Community Founder Preet Singh — Indie Worldwide
• Meet the huge, leaderless web of fans fueling BTS 🎶 Ashley Hackworth, BTS A.R.M.Y. — Get Together

🛠 Tools & Resources

• Cactus Comments — Cactus Comments is a federated comment system for the web, based on the Matrix protocol.
• People & Company’s Community Consulting Rolodex

🐦 Tweets