Real Good Community Links
What I've been inspired by this week...
I’ve had so much room to listen closely to what is going on in the community landscape over the last few months. Usually I’m heads down building and scaling community programs, so I’m grateful for this shift.
If I wasn’t chatting with others (with no agenda, just taking in what people I admire have to say!), I wouldn’t have found a few things I want to share with you.
A fellow member of ODF4, Shweta, sent me this incredible Medium post today: The Invisible Labor of Content Moderation. In it Gaby Goldberg asks, “Moderation shapes social norms, public discourse, and cultural production — so why does it receive so little scrutiny?” Dig in to find out.
I’ve been thinking a lot about engagement and moderation in new audio community spaces thanks to Erin Mikail Staples.
I received a Clubhouse invite (thank you, Clubhouse angels!) and was onboarded by Andrea Hernández and Erika Batista who took the time to create an onboarding experience for me purely because they want the platform to be an inclusive, welcoming space (especially for women and POCs). Pay attention to the rituals people in your community are creating out of love. This platform is in the stage where community norms, rituals, and culture form the DNA of all future experiences. Recognizing, rewarding, and amplifying these healthy rituals will pay off exponentially as you scale.
Working with a handful of people on how to think about building and moderating community in the social audio space. Let me know if you would like to see what we come up with when its published.
And if you want a Roadtrip.fm invite and want to hang out there, shoot me a note. Want to go deep on Roadtrip? Read this.
Being an On Deck fellow has me thinking about turning ideas into MVPs. At the same time I’m talking to founders daily on how community might fit into their growth, marketing, and customer experience strategies.
This got me thinking, what it might mean to build a “community MVP”? How can you identify early members and together figure out who should be in the community, what they can do together (that they can’t do independently) and what minimal test can they run together to figure out what a more permanent community might look like? Know someone who might want to test this theory out, reach out!
What I haven’t had to the time to do is listen to the tech hearings happening right now, so I know what I’ll be doing this weekend.
Related: Don’t miss former FB employee’s 20 minute internal memo shared by Buzzfeed news. “We are failing,” he says, criticizing Facebook’s leaders for catering to political concerns at the expense of real-world harm. “And what's worse, we have enshrined that failure in our policies…We are hurting people at scale.”
I’ll leave you with something a little lighter! This Guide to Online Friendships is what the world needs right now. Start a new message thread with your favorite people! Send a postcard to someone you haven’t heard from in a while. Build a pop-up micro-community around an obsession (ex. online book club!). Let me know how it goes.