Building a Community in Public: Infrastructure, Drive, Environment
Why do some people wait to be asked, while others just get on with it? We’re testing whether you can build an environment where initiative becomes contagious.
Not long ago Antonia, one of my readers, asked me a question about the community we’re building.
Can a community develop initiative in people, or only attract those who are already ready to act? And how do you help someone get started without making them dependent on the organisers?
I answered with three words: Infrastructure, Drive, Environment. IDE for short.
It’s a working model, not a universal formula. But it’s one we can test.
QuorumLab, a European startup, has started building an international professional community and invited me to help develop it. We’re building it in public and writing up what we decide and what we learn along the way.
In earlier pieces I explored how members can create a second economy by generating value for one another. Now I want to ask what comes before that.
What has to be in place for people to start acting together at all?
From studying subcultures to a practical experiment
I study subcultures as part of Dr Oleg Maltsev’s private postgraduate programme. I’m interested in how groups form around a shared idea, how authority develops inside them and how practical experience gets passed on.
In his book Sketch a Subculture, Dr Maltsev writes: “An authoritative opinion is distinguished by its usefulness.”
Authority needn’t come from a job title. People listen when someone’s knowledge, decisions and advice prove useful.
IDE is my attempt to apply the mechanisms I study to a specific professional environment.
I for Infrastructure: something to start with
It usually goes like this. Someone starts a community, opens a Telegram group or Discord server, invites members and arranges meetups. Then they look for ways to keep everyone busy.
I prefer the opposite approach. First there has to be a foundation people can work with.
QuorumLab has its own technology, research expertise, international professional connections and AO Platform, a working digital environment that brings together a range of tools, AI and multi-agent systems.
This is the starting infrastructure, not the limit of what the community can do.
Members can bring their own tools and research, add skills the group doesn’t have yet, and expand the shared infrastructure.
Imagine an entrepreneur who knows a market but lacks a development team. Another member brings the technology, and a third has customer contacts.
Together they can build a product, find clients and sign contracts, even if the work has nothing to do with QuorumLab’s core business.
Shared resources obviously need clear rules on who can use them and how. But the principle is simple. You don’t walk into an empty room that you first have to furnish. You walk into a place where the groundwork for real activity already exists, and where you can build on it yourself.
D for Drive: initiative comes with responsibility
Even the best infrastructure guarantees nothing.
Specialists may have tools and potential partners and still sit waiting for someone to hand them a task.
Drive means an entrepreneurial streak, not necessarily owning a business. A researcher, a developer or a consultant can spot an opportunity and turn an idea into concrete action.
Drive also needs something else: responsibility.
Entrepreneurial work means answering for your decisions, agreements, deadlines and results. It isn’t enough to come up with an interesting idea or get people onto yet another Zoom call. If you start a project, you need to know who will do what, who needs the result, and what each participant has committed to.
The idea that unites us fits in one sentence: Build your place in the AI economy.
That doesn’t mean everyone must launch a tech startup. The AI economy is reshaping professions and markets, and members can use the skills they have or learn new ones to find their place in it.
Members can still talk about books, films or philosophy, travel together and make friends. But this isn’t a philosophy club or a place for endless talk.
What matters to us is that ideas turn into projects and acquaintances turn into working partnerships.
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Research by the psychologists Richard Ryan and Edward Deci shows how much intrinsic motivation depends on autonomy, competence and a sense of connection with other people. A social environment can support self-driven motivation, but it can’t be relied on to create it in everyone.
So the initial core has to include people who are already used to acting and owning the result.
Can other members learn to act this way too?
E for Environment: when effectiveness becomes contagious
Suppose the community includes specialists with expertise that’s hard to find. They’re already building products, landing contracts and making money. Sooner or later, people start asking them questions.
How did you land that client? Why did you pick that technology? How did you set up the work with a partner in another country? What did you change after a failed project?
Over time, small circles form around these specialists. Their knowledge is in demand, and their real results give weight to what they recommend.
Figures of authority emerge, and this brings us back to the principle of usefulness that Dr Maltsev describes.
What interests me, though, isn’t just the appearance of people with authority. It’s the mechanism that follows: the chance to copy effective patterns of behaviour.
I don’t mean copying someone’s words or outward habits. Members want to understand how people who build, grow and earn actually work.
How do they organise their day and make decisions? What do they stop doing? Why do some actions pay off while others turn out to be a waste of time?
You get to compare their ways of doing things with your own and adjust as you go, dropping what doesn’t work in favour of what you can test in practice.
That takes more than a group chat. Members need ways to share knowledge and apply it.
One is a space where members can present their own tools, projects and ideas, explain how they solved a problem, or find partners.
Another is internal lectures and professional meetups, where specialists work through real problems and share what they’ve learned.
We’re also planning mini-startups and joint projects, where members can test ideas, take responsibility for different parts of the work and see whether there’s a market for what they build.
You can listen all you like to someone who knows how to run international negotiations. It’s a completely different experience when the two of you are putting together a commercial proposal, negotiating contract terms and doing the actual work side by side.
What I’d most like to see is new people starting work on their own initiative and owning it. A bigger audience gathered around one experienced specialist would be a far smaller result.
That’s how Environment starts to reinforce Drive.
Why IDE only works as a whole
Take any one element away and you get something familiar: tools nobody uses, driven people working alone, or a friendly group that never builds anything together.
That’s why I look at the three conditions as one connected system.
Infrastructure provides the means and the opportunities to act. Drive ties initiative to responsibility for the result. Environment gives access to other members’ skills, helps people copy effective patterns of behaviour and lets them put what they learn into practice.
None of this guarantees the community will last. Governance, shared resources and continuity will each need their own attention.
Right now, though, we’re testing an earlier and quite specific mechanism: can people in an environment like this start creating projects, partnerships and economic opportunities for each other on their own?
Putting it to the test
Lately I’ve met practitioners wrestling with similar questions.
White Robot is building an ecosystem around STUDIO-J. Riaan helps develop professional connections in the music scene around Electric Safari Records. Trenton Ian Cook is working on Mirror Field OS, and Andrei Savine has hands-on experience building a professional community inside AWS.
In future pieces I’d like to test IDE against their experience.
In the meantime, we’re launching the first beta group of the community QuorumLab has started.
If you’d like to see how it works, and maybe join, send me a direct message.
I’m curious to see how many people, over time, start creating opportunities not only for themselves but for other members too.
References
Maltsev, Oleg (Dr Oleg Maltsev). Sketch a Subculture. A methodological guide to researching subcultures.
Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.68
