Why do people care?
People are drawn to ideas they care about.
Missions and values they believe in.
And even art, memes and humour too.
These are the seeds in which a community grows from.
Communities can achieve things we are individually unable to do — from crowd funding, collective knowledge sharing to celebration and partying! Humans need one another. And not because we can make money from each other, but because communities provide us this opportunity to be part of something greater than ourselves.
We all have a desire to connect, to share, to learn from like-minded and like-valued people. If you are currently building a community, try and ask community members:
What makes this community unique?
Why are you here in this community? Why are you still here?
You’ll likely be surprised at what you will learn.
This is culture at it’s most granular form.
Use these insights to more meaningfully connect with your existing community and also better understand how you can more effective communicate the community’s shared goals and mission to the rest of the world.
For those who are in the process of starting a new community, expect that it will take some time to form and also for you to comprehend your culture. But when you can finally find shared answers to those questions above — understand that you finally have something real, precious and alive.
Starting a new community?
One of the best ways to understand how culture in communities start, emerge and form is to examine the cultures of existing communities in which you resonate with:
How they get started?
How did they find their first community members?
What kept the initial few community members together?
This should provide inspiration and hints to how you may get started.
Observations from the MetaCartel community
Reflecting back on the first several months of MetaCartel, what surprises me in hindsight was how influential the group’s memes and the shared sense of humour were in establishing the culture that the community is today.
What kind of self respecting tech community would elect a dancing chilli as its logo?
Side note: For what its worth, I initially hated it but the those in the community really enjoyed how ridiculous it was, so we kept it. Lol.
As idiosyncratic as it its, in hindsight, this initial joke that the community championed became an important memetic filter for the community. We believed in not taking ourselves too seriously and having fun! I guess this was how we first expressed that.
Despite the strangeness of the dancing chilli, it never stopped us from attracting the right people from getting involved. Community is not always about including everyone but a careful balance between curation and inclusion. (more on this later)
Aside from the logo, the group of course also had the DNA of collaboration established from the beginning — starting as a technical working group and all, hence our motto of:
"If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together"
If you want to learn more about the early origins of MetaCartel and its cultural remnants, check out our Folklore page here.
Criticisms on the crypto community
Most people behind ‘Ethereum killers‘ don’t understand that Ethereum’s community culture is it’s defensive moat. People are drawn to missions, values, art, culture and humour. Building a community from the basis of better technology is an uphill battle.
You don’t need a community to build better technology — you can just do this with a team and some funding. What culture differentiates you? What do you bring to the lives other other people aside from just TPS?
We have a lot of technologists trying to solve an inherently social problem.
If these ‘next generational‘ blockchains will succeed, I believe it will do so because they will have successfully been patient enough to foster culture, create trust within their community and have found a resonating north star that strikes at the core of everyone in their communities.
> How you will get there is another question and that is a process that I will continue to write about in the coming weeks and months.
This is a series of blog posts on how to better understand communities and how we can build more human centred technology.