It’s time to design the internet we need
The age of mature, totalizing, massive social media platforms has been great for advertisers. Hundreds of millions of people gathered in a single place makes for amazing billboard opportunities.
For individuals, though, this state of affairs has been exhausting. Our online interactions seem more likely to deplete us than restore.
In this context, there’s an exciting opportunity to build social connection in private, at much more human scale. People want to build relationships, and as ever, they have problems to solve.
With this in mind, I tried out a new approach to community: fast to deploy, loosely structured, and ephemeral.
It turns out the internet is still great for creating together. This is especially powerful for consensus building exercises like workshops, and for supporting the launches of new products or features. Gathering people from across the globe can cost much less than we’re used to in both time and budget, while creating lasting impact that brief in-person events can’t match. Here’s how it works.
Design decisions
Where do we go from here? was a prototype for one way I believe we can build internet communities in this phase of the web.
“Flash communities” are temporary digital gatherings where a curated group can go deep on a problem space, with the goal of building skills and consensus, sharing information and developing relationships.
I led a group of technologists in guided, asynchronous discussion of where our industry is and what we’d like it to become, with daily themes and prompts. Our time culminated in two and a half hours of live talks with experts.
Here’s what we got for these decisions.
Asynchronous, with a dash of video
“Online events” are too often an exhausting, endless smear of synchronous video. By trying to shoehorn physical formats into digital spaces, we get the worst of both worlds. Video calls don’t lend themselves to the sort of informality that we love about making friends at conferences, and sitting still while gazing at a screen for hours can be taxing on the mind.
So instead, we leaned into what makes electronic community so powerful: flexibility. Text-based interactions via Discord could happen at the convenience of participants’ schedules, allowing us all to come and go according to the other demands of our days.
Toward the end of our time, a comparatively brief, synchronous video event scheduled weeks in advance gave folks the ability to hear from speakers on themes we’d already explored in depth.
Invite-only
When convening people to engage in shared work, finding folks who are able and willing to be good collaborators is Step 0. So I intentionally added some friction.
The event signup form asked people to answer a key question: “What kind of future do you want for technology?” I selected participants willing to be thoughtful in their answers, as such thoughtfulness aligned with the kind of experience I was looking to create.
This small bit of upfront work for applicants allowed me to gauge the kinds of contributions I could expect from them before we ever got started. If someone was unwilling to put effort into an answer from the outset, they probably wouldn’t be interested in putting in much effort during the gathering itself. As the event unfolded, this bore out: consistently, participants did the work to communicate earnestly and thoughtfully, leading to candid, high-integrity discussion.
Ephemeral
Many stewards of communities ask contributors for open-ended commitments which can lead to erosion of enthusiasm over time, while excluding participants who can’t make that degree of investment. More than that, an open-ended community can go to seed over time without ongoing effort and intervention.
This gathering only lasted for one week, from Sunday-Friday.
In surveys, participants reported it was easier to commit to the experiment upfront knowing it was temporary. By the end of the week, the group had bonded enough that there were requests for the shared space to persist. It’s worth noting that I also wanted to keep the party going and struggled to keep my promise. Ultimately, I stuck to my word and kept the gathering transient, preserving energy for future iterations. In the weeks that followed, participants offered additional ideas for continued engagement.
Scoped
Trust among a group of people comes from racking up experiences with one another. This process is rapidly sped up when the group is small enough for experiences to be attributed to specific individuals, rather than a large, undifferentiated mass of avatars. That’s why it was important to keep Where do we go from here? reasonably scaled.
Invites were only issued to 28 people, with the understanding that not everyone would be equally engaged at all times. After being given access to chat, participants were encouraged to introduce themselves.
Within 48-72 hours social norms, like jokes and community self-regulation of “this is/isn’t what we do here”, had emerged. Post-event feedback stated that the scale of the event was ideal because people were actually able to get to know one another.
Structure creates bonds
Groups have intimacy gradients. We’ve already established that meaningful bonds come from in-depth shared experiences. I’ve seen many efforts to create community fall flat when superficial informality is encouraged upfront without enough definition of the group’s primary purpose and practice.
I led the group in conversation prompts structured around daily themes, designed to feed into speaker topics later in the week. It wasn’t until day 3, when group norms had begun to gel and rapport was built, that I introduced a “hallway track” in our shared space.
By the time we got around to the #lounge channel, the group was hungry for it, and we all enjoyed warm, playful spontaneity. Participants reported this was one of their favorite parts of the event.
What’s next?
An internet where we have agency to design social spaces according to our goals, rather than those of advertisers, is essential to the future I want.
When organizations need the help of their extended constituencies to succeed, I believe they need to start small to go big. Flash communities like this are a great way to convene your most engaged constituents, giving them the information, attention, support and relationships they need to adopt your newest causes or features.
As for my own flash community, Where do we go from here? was a deeply rewarding act of service. Thank you so much to the participants who trusted me with this experiment. I look forward to convening again in the future!
