Introducing Community Discovery, again

[Originally published on Rosieland]

I’ve been on a journey of exploring what Community Discovery is, or more exciting…what it could be. My understanding of the potential of what it could be is forever expanding.

It’s led me down a path of questioning everything I know about community.

What if we’ve been doing it all wrong?

The deeper I went, the more uncomfortable I became with current practices. I went through a bit of an existential crisis, asking myself:

• What are our roles?
• What is all this exhausting engagement about?
• What even is community when everyone is a part of it?
• Why aren’t we creating more impact?
• Are we even needed?
• Why does it feel so hard to create real change?
• Why can’t we be more creative?

I practised making observations:

• Communities fail far more than they need to
• We lack understanding of how we can create impact
• Communities don’t have the impact that they could
• Our tooling is frustrating
• We’re letting the social networks have all the fun
• ROI? Let’s not go there
• The silos are still there, even when we try to pretend they don’t