Building Global Communities
It takes a little more than the internet to make the magic happen
Hi Friends,
Write of Passage 8 came to an end last week. It was my second time taking part in Dave Perell’s online writing school.
This time around, I joined as a Community Steward and got the opportunity to help build out their approach to serving a growing global network of students.
The conundrum faced Write of Passage and online programs like it is that the internet makes it easy for companies and courses to semi-accommodate a global community.
You can view the signup page from anywhere in the world! Live discussions are recorded and stored online for viewing later. There is no physical classroom in which to meet your peers.
But to move from semi-accommodation to making global members full participants, we have to do a little more than upload our video archives to the internet.
We have to think about what it means to try and learn something at 2am.
A global community takes intentionality, a rigorous focus on operations in the background, and a bit of empathy.
For me, that’s meant time in the weeds scheduling. Comparing the relative pain of different time zones for our offerings. Adding more opportunities to join sessions with peers live.
It has also meant a creating some fractal communities. Everyone has the chance to pick content that works for them, but not everyone can be in the same big room.
If you’ve worked on building a global community for your company, course or interests, I’d love to talk.
In the meantime, I’m revisiting a short post I wrote last year on Making Friends Online for some inspiration.
Innovation Spotlight
I am excited about Storyskimo’s idea to create podcasting tools for children. Soft skills are key to professional success and personal happiness, yet so much of our educational curriculum is focused on literacy and numeracy. This start-up gives children the tools to record, produce and share (with friends in a closed platform) their ideas on books, pirates and the world around them.
I have been interested in the Creator Economy and am seeing both individual creators (Louie Bacaj) and tools for creators (such as ConvertKit) blow up everywhere. Great idea to give children the tools to learn to be creators early on and in a safe space.
Thanks for being here! And let me know what you think about online communities, and bringing children into the creator economy.
Melissa