Building a Meta Community: 6 Years on
I started a meta-community in early 2020, just before we all stayed at our desks. The goal, as I wrote at the time, was to build a rehearsal room for thinking – a space where people could show up as a process, not a product. Six years later, I am more convinced than ever that this is the work. Not because the original intuition was right, but because everything that has happened since–AI, isolation, the flattening of professional identity–has made the need sharper and more urgent.
The original provocation was simple. When we join a community, the whole apparatus is a shelving system for productized thinking. A design community invites designers to discuss designer-y things. A leadership community invites leaders to perform leadership. The community is a product offered to certain personas, and how those personas engage is designed and prescribed. I used to visualize the difference as exchanging vegetables at a market versus tending to the soil together. Most communities are in the vegetable exchange business. The interesting work happens in the soil.