With recent threads about channel names, appropriate content and community structure as a whole I want to examine the relationship between the community and its purpose. We all seem to agree on our purpose here, but the community is not the purpose itself: the community exists in the real world now; the purpose is something to be fulfilled or strive towards. I’m sure this has come up before in conversation but it seems maybe thread-worthy. Edit: I bring this up because I think there’s a whole bunch of people here who are highly motivated to figure out how to get to the future we want, really just wondering how we can all help each other do that. (more in thread)

Reflecting a bit... I suspect the way that this community benefits each member varies based on their personal circumstances. For me, it's a way to talk to peers about ideas, ask questions, get feedback, and otherwise network (I live in a forest in a very non-tech part of Canada, so this and Twitter are my main ways to talk to other programmers). For some, it's a place to learn. For others, it's an audience. We're here because we share an interest in futurist computing (which I'll use as an umbrella for this stuff). But how we're each trying to explore that future is different. Some folks are in academia working on a PhD. Some folks are doing a startup. Some are (like me) smuggling FoC ideas into an existing org though a backdoor (so to speak). Some are hobbyists. All of these people, with the different ways they are working on FoC-like projects, and their different relationships to the community, have different needs. If we came up with some community initiative to push toward that common goal, it would either be very broad and loose and small so that many people could participate, or it'd be more focused and supportive but only helpful to the people whose circumstances were a fit for it. As an example, we created the #C0120A3L30R channel as a way to improve the kinds of feedback people were getting on their FoC projects. This is a fairly broad, low-effort, low-stakes way to build some momentum, but even this seems to be inapplicable to the majority of the community. Only one person has managed to post regular updates. Most people who post at all have posted only two or three videos. And the majority of the community haven't posted anything, or even commented on what has been posted. #C0120A3L30R was an experiment, and we've learned some more about how the community works (and doesn't) from running it. I hope to see more folks post there, but it certainly seems as though it'd take something different to unlock energy and collective forward movement from this community. I would love for there to be more community initiatives, but that tradeoff between being very helpful to a small number of people vs only vaguely helpful to a large number of people is a tricky dilemma.

That was a great answer and I can’t really think of much to add. I hope in the future as the community grows we see subgroups with the right circumstances pool resources and mount different focused efforts —evangelising the future, casting doubt on the status quo, directing funding, gaining the attention of important individuals, etc— In the meantime it seems like utilising network effects to spread the cause is one of the best uses of effort, especially if it leads to more funding for the community. I wonder if there’s any hint of a curve to the member count, or is it still mostly linear growth? You mentioned reworking onboarding sometime recently, I think having places like that to direct people towards will be really important. (and give context to the content of talks by Bret, Alan, Joe, and other evangelisers.

directing funding

That would be magical, but we only have 1 benefactor so far (Repl.it) and the amount they pay vs the time cost of making the podcast... means I have to justify the time investment on the basis of doing it because I love it, haha. If the community gets some more funding, there's a bunch of initiatives I'd love to funnel it toward. For one, throwing Mariano a few bones for the newsletter and tools he's building. For two, some scratch for the folks working on a community zettel. For three, I'd love to get some regular video chat based events going, and someone could organize those. For four, I'd love to pay someone from an underrepresented background who is already working on something like this.. to do a bit of an anthropology of similarly underrepresented folks in the history of HCI / PL / hardware / etc. — there are some amazing projects buried in the past, that I'm aware of only in passing, that would blow minds if they were distilled into an accessible form (something like Steve's Catalog).

In the meantime it seems like utilising network effects to spread the cause is one of the best uses of effort. [...]

To the extent that it's sort of happening automatically, totally agree. I like that the community has a good reputation for the subject matter, and I want to keep it that way. (The community does, or at least did, have a reputation for being male-dominated and "bro-y", which I am doing what I can to fix. I think this will mostly take hygiene — kicking out anyone toxic — and time, but I also think this is a good place to spend some of our community-initiative energy.) While I do like seeing the community grow, the main thing I'm interested in is keeping it sticky. We've had 1200 people pass through the door (going by the member count on #C5T9GPWFL), but there are only about 300 who are still here, actively participating or lurking. That's a fine ratio, IMHO, but I'd love to see it get better and not get worse.

@Ivan Reese Is there a single place where all those project ideas are curated?

You mean other than my head? Not yet. A community zettel would be a great place for this. Until then, I could spin up a page on the site.

Really interested in the community Zettel ! Also some other things. Now how to organise collaboration?

There are a few folks working on this. My hope is to give them some time to work on this their own way, and then perhaps open it up for other folks to try other approaches if the first one doesn't pan out in a few months.

Yes I think I answered on the other thread. Let’s split up “your” work and find ways to collaborate

@Ivan Reese Would be great to have a project ideas list somewhere public, perhaps even editable? The more work-in-progress and pragmatic it looks, the better. Then a next step could be to list small and simple next steps for those who are looking to contribute something, but don’t know where to start. I’m hopeful that a lot of inertia is just not knowing where to begin.

@Stefan Here's what I whipped up — let me know if this is close enough to what you had in mind: https://futureofcoding.org/collaboration (cc @opeispo @Orion Reed)

“This is a spreadsheet listing Future of Coding “ but no link yet 🙂. Otherwise looks 👍🏾

Awesome, @Ivan Reese. Thanks for putting this together. This would be a great page to link to from the home page. And we should probably mention it in a more popular channel, after the name changes are done. Let me know if you want some help with the website or in-channel announcement.

@Ivan Reese I think I might have a idea regarding funding

@curious_reader FoCoin? :)

Akasha.world

@Stefan Agreed! The most immediate helpful help would be proofreading, offering better phrasings, or adding additional content to the upcoming Member's Handbook (something Alex Miller pointed me to here that I'm going to shamelessly adopt). I'll post a draft of that in #CEXED56UR some time soon.

Though I almost didn’t notice because the link before this section was a url and this was just text(highlighted in blue but yeah, took a sec)