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Building Communities

§ How to

  1. Brainstorm what kind of people you want to attract
  2. Brainstorm the activities you want to do
  3. Brainstorm your values

When thinking about Building a Neighborhood Campus, this is what it looked like for us:

  1. Brainstorm what kind of people you want to attract
    • Kind amibitious nerds
  2. Brainstorm the activities you want to do
    • side projects
    • learning stuff
    • going to meetups together
    • cooking together
    • hiking
    • content together: For example, prepare talks every half year for the others
  3. Brainstorm your values
    • Growth Mindset
    • Act like a host (Pacman Rule, for example)
    • Allow be weird

§ Theses

#1 Building a community is like building a startup.

What do I mean by that?

  • It’s a High-uncertainty problem you can (and should) tackle with all the high-uncertainty problem solving methods available (aka. Startup Methods)
  • You don’t care at all about pleasing the general public. You want to create the strongest enthusiasm possible in the largest group of people—but when you need to/want to choose (and you will need to choose), you want to pick the greater enthusiasm for the smaller amount of people. Always.
  • Your success depends on the Subculture creators you draw into your community: Those are—in startup terms—you early adopters/evangelists that draw other people (aka. their friends/communities) into your community. They are your most important ‘customers’: You want to make sure your message reaches and ‘activates’ them.
Draft in Progress

Writing in here is haphazardous, disjointed and sketchy.

It's probably a good idea to come back later.

#2 Building a community means building a (somehow protected/walled) garden.

Why?

Let’s say you achieve #1. Over time, more and more people will come and enjoy the place all of you first-comers built in the first place.

ou want and need to create a space a certain subgroup of people really enjoys, and then is able to spend time under the social rules you (the initial group) set up in it. It can change with time, of course.

Seems reasonable, right? Yet it has two not-so-easy-to-get-right parts about it.

  1. It’s important that some people really enjoy being there. Otherwise, nobody will come.
  2. To make that happen, there have to be some rules (be they explicit or implicit, social or otherwise). What is important is not what they are, but that you enforce them. If you don’t fight for it, your garden will die.

And Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism. Meaning you need to be very, very clear about whom to allow in and to participate and whom you don’t allow in.

Normally, if you already got found by some people, #1 is not the problem. I’m worrying you’ll fail at the second one.

For enforcing the rules, you 1) need to know them and 2) be prepared to defend them.

In the case of the School of Moral Amibition, you have the rules and know them.

How do you prepare to defend them? You collect every instance of someone that didn’t fit/alienated people, and.

From the onboarding, I think can out the following prototypes:

  1. People that don’t want to actually work on the cause, but only be part of the community (MOPs in Subculture terms)
  2. People that only want to find people for their own cause—and not contribute to this one
  3. People that only want to show off (consciously or unconsciously)

And, coincidentially: All of them are also people that make it on average less joyful for the ones that are morally ambitious to participate in the community.

So, defend your garden.

#3 Maintaining a community means having and using a grayspace

You (probably, most of the time) want two things from communities:

  1. You want it to endure (or grow?)
  2. You want it to be as interesting as possible for the members of the community to stay

Non-growing systems wither away over time. So if you want your system to not to die, you need it to grow.

Because of 1., you need your community to grow.

When your community grows,

Enforcing the rules from 2) has a big problem: What do you do with people that are nice and could fit in, but don’t have the skills cultural knowledge to participate meaningfully?

Ostensibly(?), you’ve only got two options: You can either keep them out (bad, no growth), or have them in the community growing.

This makes it less fun for everyone else currently in the community to participate.

So you’re facing a bad choice: No growth and fun, or growth and no fun (and no more growth in the long run).

But you can solve this pretty easily: By having an intermediate space—a grayspace.

References / Further Reading

Pacman Rule
Make More Grayespaces