Community Design

“As organizers, let it be friction-ful or not cute. Let it be functional and clear but maybe ugly. As participants, let us widen our zone of comfort with organizations or groups who have ancient facebook pages or websites where you aren’t sure where you even put your e-mail address. Maybe we trust them more because they’ve managed to keep going in

... See more

And if communities are spaces for belonging, cohorts are spaces for becoming.

Alongside technical tools, we need ways of defining and explaining social norms and expectations about contribution and value sharing. We need collective mechanisms for decision-making about shared assets, that make people feel heard while recognising the limitations, constraints and realities of their maintenance. We need people and organisations ... See more

look at how the word “ community ” itself has been warped in recent years into a cynical marketing cliché to rival “storyteller” — annexed as the torched rhetorical territory of people who live to “move product” above all else.

The co-opting of “community” into a sales strategy is insidious, not only because it reduces likeminded groups of people t... See more