The hope for more collective action, solidarity and deeper connection.

For three weeks I went through a mix of feelings. I adapted to life from home, juggled between work and family and used the spare time I had left to stay in touch with friends, catch up on the news and go to sleep with Netflix.

I didn’t feel bad for not using my time to read more books, learn a new language or start a side project. While my body was stuck at home, my mind wandered restlessly; trying to read, listen and observe what’s going on in the world to make sense of it.

In a widely shared Harvard Business Review article David Kessler argues that the discomfort we’re feeling is grief. A collective grief about the loss of normalcy, the fear of uncertainty and the loss of connection.

What I observe though is hope.

There’s a desire that we start to care for each other more; that the collective action we witness today will arm us to tackle future challenges; that we collectively re-discover the concept of solidarity; that the internet becomes a place to make deep connections again.

Will this crisis change how we exist collectively?

Any prediction today is just a hopeful projection into the future.
Below are five observations based on the articles and experiences that shape my thoughts today.

1. Now is the time to see how connected we all are.

We remember 2019 as the year when Greta Thunberg became famous, millions of people took to the streets and it seemed impossible that airplanes stop flying, governments restrict the economy and masses of individuals change their behavior.

Right now we witness exactly that. We experience how interdependent we really are and how cooperation is key to survive.

Will this prevail after the crisis? Probably quite the opposite. But this collective experience could lay the groundwork for the collective action we’ll need to deal with other global crises that follow.

Read more by David Byrne: The World Is Changing — So Can We

2. Togetherness in times of crisis.

The virtual meetings, concerts, karaoke sessions, reading clubs and other hangouts that take place online now make us realize that community is a mental mindset, not tied to a physical location. A group of people gathering for the same purpose at the same time at the same (virtual) place is what matters.

While a few weeks ago we still wondered if all the cancelled conferences can take place online instead, the clear answer today is: yes. We will create new spaces for us to meet in small and intimate groups online.

I found Toby Shorin’s observations on the future of culture, brands and entertainment helpful.

3. A dawning awareness of solidarity.

In times of crises we rediscover our innate desire to help one another. We deliver food to our neighbors, sing on balconies, donate millions of masks and celebrate those that keep the system alive.

This is a dramatically different view from the world we knew a few weeks ago. A world where there was nothing wrong when individuals and nation states cared mostly about their own interests. In times of economic prosperity and technological advancements the concept of solidarity almost felt unfashionable.

Will this change after the crisis?

“We may see a dawning awareness of dependence, community and solidarity” writes historian Rutger Bregman.

4. Design for society.

Projects by IF, a London-based studio specializing on ethical use of data, published a manifesto on March 21 2020 that states that the age of human-centred design is over soon. Instead, our desires will shift to products and services that consider people as part of wider society:

“20th century approaches like design thinking, human-centered design, and jobs to be done too often look at people solely as individuals. Or, worse yet, only as consumers. They don’t consider people in relation to their communities or to wider society. And society itself is ignored by design.”

Read and sign the Manifesto for Society-Centred Design.

5. The Self vs The Collective

The biggest revelation of this crisis is that much of what mattered before doesn’t matter anymore.

Who cares about influencers and branded content today? What do all the Airbnb landlords do sitting on empty apartments? Would anyone really regret if some low-cost airlines and other businesses that avoid paying taxes at all cost will disappear?

It dawns on us that optimizing for self-interest is only fun until it lasts. In times of crises inequality becomes more visible and the public good — our institutions, governments and health insurances — key to survive.

I was inspired by reading The Umami Theory of Value by brand consulting duo Nemesis. It’s a wide ranging analysis of the experience economy from 2008 until now, published just in time for this crisis to mark its final end.

A chance to catch a breath

Throughout all the above observations I can sense one notion: the appetite for change.

As we face one of the biggest health crisis in history many of us remain hopeful that we won’t go back to the world as we knew it. That things slow down. That we care for each other more. That the world becomes more equal. That life can be less about self-improvement and more about improving the collective good.

Danielle Pender expressed what many of us feel right now. Let’s not rush into panic work. Let’s take this time to reflect and understand what we really want so that we come out of this situation a little wiser.

This is a slightly edited version of the co — matter newsletter sent yesterday.
814 people from 74 countries subscribe to receive a monthly update on the future of community. You can subscribe here: http://co-matter.com/mailinglist

Header photo by Edward Hopper.

Togetherness in times of crisis was originally published in co — matter on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This is this year’s final edition of the co — matter digest, a monthly mailing list about the future of bringing people together.

It was January 24 2019 and we have gathered in Berlin Kreuzberg for the Community Leadership Summit #2.

80 people from all over Europe joined to spend an afternoon and evening to talk about the future of bringing people together.

All of us came from very different backgrounds.

We run companies, non-profits, restaurants, newspapers, marketplaces, Youtube channels and startups, organize conferences, develop games, moderate forums, fight climate change.

What brought us together is a shared interest in serving the communities we care about.

To me this is what makes co — matter special.

So this final newsletter of the year is here to say thank you.

Thank you for reading this newsletter, contributing your thoughts, joining our summits, listening to our conversations, reading the reports and helping us grow this network of like-minded people.

2020 will see more of all that.

We hope to see you there.
Severin

Now scroll down to see some of our favorite moments of the year.

In words:

• All the incredible people who have shared their insights through our podcast and summits.
• The Community Leadership Summit #2 in Berlin, exploring the Post Social Media Age.
• The Podcast Studio at Tech Open Air Berlin with Samsung NEXT and Tech Open Air.
• The Future of the Social Web Sessions at The Conference in Malmö.
• The Community Leadership Summit #3 in Copenhagen, exploring the Power of Movements.
• The Pop-in Calls on the podcast, our new 10 mins format where members of the network share insights and ideas.

We’ll see you in 2020 ✨

🔵 Mark your calendars: we’re partnering with Internet Age Media to explore the future(s) of Everything at IAM Weekend in Barcelona, March 19–21.

Sign up to our mailing list if you want to receive monthly updates from the co — matter network.

This year started with 80 people in a room. was originally published in co — matter on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Once every year we capture a global perspective on what brings people together in The State of Communities. These days many of the people we talk with are discussing their relationship with social media, so we decided to ask them directly if they had done anything to reduce their social media use.

Below are some of their answers.

1. I delete Instagram after each usage so I have to install it again.
2. I hide apps in folders.
3. I don’t save my password so when I come back I have to think twice before I engage again.
4. I turned my iPhone colours grey.
5. I tried different extensions to hide everything from vanity metrics (likes, retweets, followers) to the feeds.
6. I run out of battery on purpose.
7. I’ve to read 30 minutes before I allow myself to use Instagram.
8. I choose to have a windows phone.
9. I’ve removed some apps like FB or Emails from my phone already two years ago
10. I don’t take my phone with me in social settings (dinners, parties, etc).
11. I got rid of followers, friends and the likes on digital platforms and bought more guitar gear and vinyls.
12. Sleep more.

What have you done to increase or decrease your social media usage this year? Take part in our survey until June 20th to contribute your view. The final results will be published in the State of Communities Report by the end of summer.

How To Reduce Social Media was originally published in co — matter on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Across the world, one of the first apps people download on their phone is Google Maps. In fact, last month Google Maps became the only second app to pass 5 billion downloads. And when people don’t use Google Maps, they are likely to use Apple Maps, Bing Maps or OpenStreetMap.

To have the world at our hands helps us navigate to our destination without getting lost. For people in the Amazonian rainforest maps are even more important; maps help them claim ownership of where they live.

Together with scientific advisor Bruno Sánchez-Andrade Nuño, Emily Jacobi from Digital Democracy and a group of 35 research fellows at SPACE10, we explored how maps help us decide what roads to improve to reduce mortality and enables us to gain credit by verifying our property claims

Below is our field guide to how digital maps helps the next generation in ways we often overlook.

1. Digital Maps Are at the Foundation of Data Driven Development

Maps are used to measure how far people are from schools. With this information you can measure how many minutes kids are away from schools and what percentage of them live less than 20 minutes from a school. This number provides a strong indication of literacy.

What percentage of the world is less than fifteen minutes away from a hospital? That question provides you with an indication of mortality. So based on maps, governments know how to decrease mortality by improving roads. Because if something happens in a certain village, then instead of 30 minutes the villagers can get to the hospital in 10.

2. Five Billion People Have Given Google The Power to Decide What Is Truth

Today Google Maps put everyone ahead with maps. Before Google Maps it was very hard to know where you were and where you wanted to go. Google Maps is the second app to achieve five billion downloads. The other one is YouTube. It is that important for us to have maps.

At the same time giving Google the power to decide what to show on the map comes at a cost. It is similar to giving Google the power to decide what is truth. Maps are not a perfect representation of reality, maps are leaving out many details.

What are the companies, community organisations and authorities that are shown when you search for a place in Google Maps? Are these the same places that your friend would see? Your grandparents? And what are the places left out by commercial interests?

3. Maps Are Only Useful When They Are Imperfect

Maps are missing things. That is the beauty of maps. How much can you remove from a map to make it useful? If you had everything on the map it would be hard to find anything and thereby the map would lose its usefulness.

This is the business of Mapbox. Building on OpenStreetMap, Mapbox allows people to create their own maps, highlighting what is relevant to them. In this way a bike rental company can create a map showing where their bikes are while at the same time hiding public transport or competing bike rental shops.

4. Maps Are Extremely Political

The borders on Google Maps are placed differently depending on whether you access it from China or India. This is surprising at first, but it is not surprising when you see a map in your native language. In this way we are constantly changing the realities of maps.

When you travel to India, the immigration form it says it is forbidden to import drugs, pornographic material and maps with illegal borders. The problem is that the borders often depend on who you ask. Just think about the disputed territories in Russia, Ukraine, Tibet, China, India and Kashmir. This makes it hard for places like OpenStreetMap and the World Bank that requires a canonical database, one single map that is true to everyone.

5. Maps Empowers People To Claim and Take Ownership

Maps are not just about where is the next restaurant or bank. Maps give agency and legitimacy to people. If you live in a slum without street names and then one day your street has a name, it makes it more official and people become very proud to be able to name the street where they live.

After the civil war in Kosovo, women used maps to claim the ownership of the land they were living on. Land that historical only had been possible for men to claim. Claiming ownership of the land also meant that the women could ask for credits, using the land as collateral to accelerate other business opportunities.

6. Community Driven Maps Could Be The Future

When Haiti was hit by the earthquake in 2010, the community used OpenStreetMap to respond and record the impact of the earthquake. The community added details on what houses were destroyed and what roads were still working, allowing for emergency people responding to have the most updated version of the catastrophe. In very short time Port au Prince became the most mapped place in the world, creating something that no single company could accomplish. It shows the power of community.

Communities could make decentralized, offline, customized, inclusive and democratic maps with OpenStreetMap. However, unless we rally the communities for doing this, the future of maps lies in the hands of Google, Facebook and Apple who have a vested interest in making their own maps the true reality.

7. Making Maps Accessible Should Be On Everyone’s List

Many of the existing tools that are out there are very difficult to use and requires a lot of expertise that people living in remote areas often don’t have. There is a lot of possibility in building open source tools that are really build with and for local communities.

One example is Mapeo, a mapping and environmental monitoring tool that can also be used for other types of local documentation. Mapeo has been built with indigenous communities in the Amazon, where it is used to protect their land from the evading oil-industry. Struggles that at first can sound unfamiliar to us, but often is not much from reality in Copenhagen, New York and Berlin, where local communities are fighting commercial interest from real estate developers.

About the Research

Welcome to the World Wide Web is a series of conversations, exploring how digital technologies empower people across the world, looking at everything from out-of-the-box ideas and cultural norms, to certain phenomena that define digital life.

The series strive to better understand how the Internet of the future enables more people to live better lives and use these different environments as a mirror to reflect upon our own digital behaviours.

We look into key technologies (mobile, voice, AI), human needs (physiological, safety, belonging) and cultural norms (traditions, religions, societal structures) that shape the online experience for the next generation on the world wide web.

About the Speakers

Emily Jacobi

Emily is passionate about leveraging technology to empower marginalised communities. Prior to founding Digital Democracy, she worked for Internews Network, AllAfrica.com and as Assistant Bureau Director for Y-Press. Working directly with grassroot organisations and marginalised tribes in the Amazonian rainforest, Emily knows the power of maps to protect our environment and human rights.

Bruno Sánchez-Andrade Nuño

Bruno is a scientific advisor committed to bringing the maximum possible value of science to society. With a background as chief scientist of Mapbox and VP for social impact at Satellogic, Bruno has profound and tangible knowledge about the creation of maps and how maps are used to create social impact across the world.

About co-matter

co-matter explores what makes communities thrive. We help people to connect, share and create value together.

Maps as Truths: How the Next Generation of Internet Users Navigates the Unknown was originally published in co — matter on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The story of Polaroid Originals: How a community of instant film fans brought a global brand back to life

When Polaroid Originals launched in September 2017 it built on the groundwork of the Impossible Project: the project that set out to save instant film a decade earlier and built a community of die-hard analogue enthusiasts around it.

What followed is the story of re-inventing the most chemically complex man-made product on the planet. It took a lot of sweat and tears, research and development, user testing, feedback loops, transparency, honesty and trust — eventually turning into one of the most engaged and creative online communities supporting a brand like Polaroid Originals today.

Amy Heaton led their community for 3+ years. In this article, first shared at our Community Leadership Summit in Copenhagen, she explores the five steps that supported the Polaroid Originals community and encouraged it to thrive.

From the desk of Amy Heaton (Former Social & Content Manager at Polaroid Originals):

When the journey started with The Impossible Project, founded by a group of analogue enthusiasts in 2008, the instant film community had been very much involved in the research & development of the film. They were heavily invested both financially and emotionally: testing new emulsions, contributing to the research and eventually investing their own money into the project to further improve the chemical formula and help bring back the beauty of the original Polaroid instant film.

However, due to changes in management around one year before I arrived in my role as Social & Community Manager, a shift in the overarching strategy had left them feeling alienated. People turned to social media to make their voices heard. They knew that in this very public sphere their opinions would eventually start to impact on the business and force the company to listen.

So when I joined The Impossible Project in 2014 my key questions were:
How do we get people heard? And how can we revive the principles of creative collaboration, sharing and participation within the community and the company?

Here are some of my key learnings from the experience of re-building communication, transparency, and trust with what I now believe to be one of the most engaged, creative and dedicated online communities supporting a brand like Polaroid Originals today.

Step One: Humanising The Brand

The main focus of my early strategy was to humanise the brand. The reality was that we were just a small start-up with a team of creative people trying to do something beautiful for the world and we wanted the community to know that.

First I chose to introduce myself personally via a newsletter to our most committed group of subscribers, and then I spent some time seeking out and joining all of the different community groups. It felt necessary for me to start being active on socials from my personal account.

Although I was acting as Community Manager on behalf of the brand, I built trust using my personal account until the community got to know me as the figure who was responsible for running the channels. It helped them to realise that they weren’t tweeting to a machine; that there was a real person behind the brand voice. Even if we couldn’t give them everything they wanted, at least someone was listening.

Step Two: Listening in (to the good, the bad, and the ugly!)

Something that I figured out quite early on about building a community online is that you really have to open to criticism even when it seems harsh a first. Especially for a brand with an incredibly engaged community who are insanely knowledgeable about your products and hold you accountable for all of your business decisions. You have to be open to learn from them and admit your mistakes. Over the years we tried to increase the opportunities for the community to reach out to us and to be heard, either online or in person.

We were more open and honest about the complexity of our film R&D and offered as much detail as we could about what was going on behind the scenes at the factory. At the end behind closed doors, we were also still struggling, we were learning, changing, and growing as a brand.

Through this approach, the community came to realise that for every one photo that they took that didn’t work, we were shooting hundreds in the factory and testing thousands of different batches of chemistry. Our world inside the company was reflective of what people were experiencing at home with the film. Because we were struggling and they were struggling, but the message that we were all in it together helped build back trust and a connection between customer and brand. And as soon we started to open the doors I could already feel the mood shifting.

Step Three: Start a conversation

There were a couple of things that we did early on that really helped. We re-established an open dialogue about film testing which allowed those customers who had been purchasing the film from us since the beginning of the project to have early access to test batches of chemistry.

These films needed further feedback before they could be released to the public. The Pioneers — as they were known — could test these films and feedback via a detailed survey that was then sent directly to the chemists in the factory who would incorporate it into their research. No matter how many tests you do in the lab. Having the opportunity to field test a new film out in the middle of the desert or in the coldest winter was a huge privilege for a small project like ours.

And without those film testers, it’s unlikely our film would be at the place that it is today. These kinds of initiatives helped to show that we really valued the community’s opinion and their knowledge.

Step Four: Establish trust with your leaders

Having Oskar Smolokowski come in as CEO in 2015 also really helped my strategy to develop. He valued transparency and honesty which benefited our community massively. He was open to hear all of my ideas for bettering our relationship with the community and was open to discuss with me how to take their feedback into account.

I felt like I could always bring community issues to him and he would try to find solutions. When we launched the I-1 camera in 2016 as Impossible Project we hosted a live video chat and a follow-up demonstration that was streamed and available to watch again via YouTube — many of the most engaged and vocal community members joined and had a chance to talk with him directly. On the day of the camera launch, he sat with me at my desk and answered questions directly on the feed.

Step Five: Show your gratitude (and mean it!)

When we started to talk about launching the new brand of Polaroid Originals I wasn’t quite sure how the community would receive the news. The week before we launched we celebrated some of Impossible’s key moments on our socials and on the day Oskar wrote a personal open letter to the community outlining his vision for the new brand and thanking them for all of their input. With the help of a newly appointed Community Manager and talented copywriter Maree Hamilton, we crafted a whole new social tone of voice for our emerging brand; which the community grew to love and appreciate.

From the day of launch up until when I left the company in December 2018 we had tripled our online community and found tonnes of creative ways to make room for newcomers without alienating our loyal customers. I feel incredibly proud to have been a part of the team who accomplished the mission to make the Impossible possible — and we couldn’t have done it without our creative community supporting us all the way.

You can follow Polaroid Originals on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter and write to me with your follow-up questions via LinkedIn.

This article is an edited transcript from Amy’s talk at the 2018 Community Leadership Summit by co–matter. Subscribe to our mailing list to get first-hand access to our case studies, research and upcoming events.

The story of Polaroid Originals: How a community of instant film fans brought a global brand back… was originally published in co — matter on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Lessons from co-matter’s Community Leadership Summit #2

To get to the Community Leadership Summit in Berlin, I had to take a few leaps of faith. On a practical level, I had to trust that the pilot on my flight won’t commit suicide, that Berlin bus drivers won’t be on a strike, that my Airbnb host won’t kill me. Then I had to trust that this whole 6-hour summit thing won’t be a waste of time. That I could talk to complete strangers and that this would somehow prove constructive. I know this sounds paranoid, but think about it. We do this all the time: the semi-conscious, almost automatic reckoning of the risks involved when we trust people we don’t know to provide services, respect rules and be nice to each other. As a society, we’ve gotten far in trusting strangers. But we’ve gotten farther in exposing deception, corruption, manipulation, unethical and immoral behaviour. We discovered our politicians lie, our banks lie, our companies lie, our platforms lie. And yet our lives depend on us trusting each other. We depend on human connection and community to thrive.

Anyway, I got there. The venue had this cosy staircase-style seating area where 85 community leaders squeezed together to be greeted by the co-matter team. We were like a group of kindergarten children, you could barely shut us up or make us sit still. Most of us had just met for the first time, but the hosts knew everyone personally, which in turn gave us a feeling of familiarity.

The plan was to have two rounds of talks, where some of the participants presented their work and the communities they led. In between, we had two breakout sessions, where people gravitated towards one of 6 topics and discussion areas, for open debate and idea generation. It was the second gathering I had ever experienced where I was surprised by how easily people spoke their minds, shared their challenges, listened and gave heartfelt advice. The first time had been at the previous edition of the same community leadership summit, in Copenhagen. In hindsight, this is not surprising at all. If you can trust anyone to build meaningful conversation and active participation, it’s going to be the community builders themselves, in all their shapes and sizes, colours and causes, challenges and unique perspectives. They are the first ones to understand the value of coming together, the first to bring their similarities and differences to the table and figure out a common way to deal with something they all care a lot about. In this case, the thing they cared about was how to gather people in a post social media age.

Someone once told me there’s so much you can learn from behind your computer screen, by reading articles, taking online courses, watching TED talks. But you’re still one brain, and you’re still alone in your endeavour. When you’re surrounded by 9 people and you’re discussing, you’re 10 brains processing something at the same time. That’s just magic.

On January 24, 85 brains synced to process the challenges and opportunities of building thriving communities in our contemporary social infrastructures.

We talked about the tools we need to use, the strategies we need to apply, the values we need to foster. Here are a few points that stuck with me the most:

We need to be social without the social media

At the end of last year, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian proclaimed the digital world had reached peak social. 2018 was particularly bad for the likes of Facebook, who finally had to pull off their bring-the-world-closer-together mask. We now know they don’t protect user data, but they use it to gain strategic advantage in high-stakes business partnerships. We know that their algorithms favour misinformation and extreme views, outrage and fear to increase user engagement. We’re far from the utopian global communities we thought social media would build.

Even without these companies’ evil agency, our digital addiction has made us bitter, lonely, selfish, obsessed with our online personas but out of touch with our real selves and our surroundings.

We talked a lot about this during the summit. The general agreement was that we should take the current state of digital social networks as a valuable lesson in how we should build genuine human interaction and collaboration. Rather than throwing our phones in the sea and hiding in a bunker away from the surveillance lords, we should mindfully consider the limitations of large-scale online community building and turn to more personal and intimate offline gatherings. Now that we finally got tired of constantly perfecting our digital identity or pretending that we always hustle and never sleep, we can start spending more real time together, sharing our thoughts, our anxieties, a laugh, a dinner.

We increasingly gather around vulnerability. We are now encouraged to show our true self rather than our best self – from one of the breakout sessions.

At the same time, we should acknowledge how much technology and the internet can still help us build diverse and unconventional communities. Imagine how hard it would have been 50 years ago to find lovers of the Mola Mola bony fish around the world and create a fan club.

Communities can use the online for functional benefits, and the offline for emotional ones – Olivia Stamp from Entrepreneur First, the world’s leading talent investor.

We need new systems of trust

Humanity didn’t thrive because we were better hunters, but because we got better at communicating, sharing and trusting one another. First, we trusted our tribe, our kin, our family–people we lived among our whole lives. Then we started trusting institutions: kings, governments, priests, corporations, banks. Now, information technology is helping us uncover that many of these institutions are not trustworthy, so we’re creating distributed trust. This is the kind of trust that flows laterally between individuals, and whose key ingredients are transparency and ownership. Let’s call it open source trust. One of the best embodiments of distributed trust in community terms? Github, the “community where more than 31 million people learn, share, and work together to build software”.

This trust is still enabled by platforms and systems, but it doesn’t depend on them to exist. As someone put it during one of the breakout sessions:

We trust the connection we build between you and me, while totally distrusting the platform/medium we use to facilitate that connection.

As community leaders, our job is to foster this trust by emphasizing the value of each member of today’s hierarchy-free communities. Our communities always know more than we do. When we interact with our members, we should ask “what do you need to know about X?”, but also “what do you know and can share about X?” (advice via Rico Grimm from Krautreporter) It’s incredible to see how much strength that brings in the community.

We need to re-learn how to talk to strangers

We attend gatherings and join communities because we need to get out of our office and our own head. We long for the creativity born out of unpredictable encounters and conversations, we crave new ideas, new projects, new jobs. But as soon as we enter a room filled with people we’re supposed to meet, we can’t find enough excuses to hide our faces behind our phones. During one breakout session, someone wondered whether their job as community managers really goes much further than helping people get drunk enough that they can loosen up and actually connect. In fact, their role is much more complex, but you could say it ultimately amounts to solving our human disconnection crisis.

We now understand that the solution isn’t to engineer networks of likes and shares, but to go back to the settings where humans have always found belonging and community: in local groups, residents associations, book clubs, dancing nights, potlucks, communal dinners. In this kind of gatherings, people are not always similar, they don’t always agree, but they are driven by a common goal.

At the summit, we discussed the lack of spaces for disagreement in digital networks–r/changemyview being that exception that proves the rule. In real life, we can’t always choose to meet certain people and block others. We often get surprised by others’ perspectives and we sometimes disagree. Why is it so hard then to engage in healthy debate online? In order to survive the algorithm, we literally need to get out and talk to strangers.

We need a brave new digital space

Even with all the Russian trolls and the click farms, online social networks aren’t going anywhere. What is–hopefully–changing is how we use them. Instead of expecting them to guide our interests and entertain us when we’re bored, we’ll use social technologies with a specific intent. To paraphrase Xavier Damman in his talk at the summit: “Communities used to be defined by what they consume; now they’ll be defined by what they create together”. Instead of just joining a digital community, we’ll shape it. That’s why one of the summit’s main questions was how to create a healthy digital space.

A healthy digital space is diverse in background but unified in purpose and values (from a conversation in a breakout session). To achieve diversity, we might sometime need to help underrepresented voices be equally heard (Johnny Drain, co-founder of independent food magazine MOLD).

A healthy digital space is based on a pay-it-forward mentality (Natasha Lytton from Seedcamp, Europe’s seed fund).

A healthy digital space functions on clear guidelines and retribution for those who abuse them (Jonathan Baker from game development studio Klang).

A healthy digital space reflects a healthy analog space, which at the end of the day could be just about not being a dick online (Fiona O’Grady from H&M). We are naturally nicer to each other in real life than online, so we have to discover what makes the difference and transfer that in the digital space.

A healthy digital space is one whose purpose is not to keep us online as much as possible, but to enable us to meet easier in real life (from a breakout session).

I want to end by sharing a poem. I didn’t know it until after the summit but, when I read it, it resonated so much with the conversation about our healthy digital space. A space that’s not necessarily safe, but it’s honest, it’s brave, it allows for equal representation and demands accountability.

Invitation to brave space

Together we will create brave space
Because there is no such thing as a “safe space”
We exist in the real world
We all carry scars and we have all caused wounds.
In this space
We seek to turn down the volume of the outside world,
We amplify voices that fight to be heard elsewhere,
We call each other to more truth and love
We have the right to start somewhere and continue to grow.
We have the responsibility to examine what we think we know.
We will not be perfect.
This space will not be perfect.
It will not always be what we wish it to be
But
It will be our brave space together,
and
We will work on it side by side.

By Mickey Scottbey Jones (discovered in a newsletter from Ladies Get Paid)

Photo credits: the wonderful Ana Santl

Communities don’t grow in troll farms was originally published in co — matter on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

TL;DR: Our second Community Leadership Summit takes place in Berlin this Thursday, January 24. Applications are closed now.

We couldn’t be more excited for an incredible, diverse group of people to meet and explore how we’ll bring people together in the post social media age.

A future that — we believe — will not be dominated by the platforms that define our understanding of social media today and that require new skills, mindsets and ethics to navigate.

For all of you who can’t be there we’ll be live tweeting from the @co_matter Twitter account and share all sessions with you in the upcoming weeks.

Summit agenda (CET / Berlin time)

Thursday January 24, 2019:

4:00PM Doors open
4:30PM A brief introduction to the post social media age by Kristoffer & Severin (co-matter)

4:45PM Part 1: The status quo of communities

The mechanics of inspiration: insights from Ableton Loop
Niklas Kroeger (Ableton)

“When community?”: Translating crypto-hype into meaningful, lasting engagement
Emily Hirschberg (Ocean Protocol)

How to stay authentic while growing a gen Z creative community
Mitchell Maynard (Depop)

Internal communities and the value of truth, well told
Simon Jon Gademan (Zalando zLabels)

Connecting the dots: how to leverage the knowledge of a global network of entrepreneurs
Olivia Stamp (Entrepreneur First)

Engaging journalism: How working together with your audience builds trust in journalism
Rico Grimm (Krautreporter)

The talks are followed by breakout sessions: deep dive workshops into specific topics.

6:30PM Communal dinner 🍽

Hosted by Kala, Kimchi queen of NYC and Phil, Ex-Noma chef and Ramen king of Copenhagen.

7:30PM Part 2: The future of communities

A hot take on fashion and social media
Fiona O’Grady (H&M)

Learnings from scaling two-sided networks. Stories from SoundCloud and Oscoin
Eleftherios Diakomichalis (Oscoin)

Un-f*cking the restaurant industry with a little tech & a lot of community
Mathias Holzmann (Informal Labs)

Building & supporting micro-communities
Natasha Lytton, Seedcamp

Watching the seed grow: creating a real world around a virtual one
Jonathan Baker (Klang Games)

ETH Exemplified: Frameworks for building decentralized communities
Adeola Ogunwole (Independent Consultant)

#citizenspring: time for citizens to get together and do something about climate change
Xavier Damman (Open Collective)

The talks are followed by breakout sessions: deep dive workshops into specific topics.

9:30PM Well-deserved drinks 🍸

Follow us on Twitter to get live updates from the Summit, starting at 4:30PM CET on Thursday, January 24.

All talks will be recorded and shared after the Summit.
Subscribe to our mailing list to be the first to receive it.

Thanks to BlueYard Capital for hosting us and the incredible team of facilitators, supporters and volunteers that help make this happen.

The Final Agenda for the Community Leadership Summit #2, Berlin was originally published in co — matter on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Over the last few years, the word “community” has become so ubiquitous, that pinning it down to just one definition is almost impossible.

From social media, customer support and user engagement to company culture, sharing economy and participatory democracy — building a community around an organization, product or brand can be as diverse as the people that lead them.

It’s this diversity that helped us set the goal of bringing these leaders together for our first Community Leadership Summit in Copenhagen, this September

Together with the experts, hailing from 18 different countries, who run communities in governments, global brands, nonprofits, startups, co-working spaces, innovation labs and creative agencies, we explored how bringing people together creates an impact.

Our key learnings:

1. Diversity. It’s extremely valuable to learn from people across different industries. We need to break out of silos and collaborate more.
2. Technology. The tools to connect people are constantly evolving, so does our adoption and behavior. We need to share more resources and best practices.
3. Community. The people who run communities are often isolated in their roles and responsibilities. A community of community leaders is sorely needed.

Scroll down to see a short recap of the talks, participants and feedback. A big thank you to all of you who joined, participated and contributed with your expertise!

The next Summit will take place in early 2019. RSVP here and we’ll notify you as soon as date and location are set.

The Talks: Stories of Huge Learnings and Epic Fails in Building Communities

A history of epic fails from Slush to Thingtesting
Jenny Gyllander, Founder at Thingtesting, VC at Backed.vc and former CMO of Slush shared about all the things that can go epically wrong when building global communities.

How we’ve built Ladies Get Paid
Claire Wasserman, founder of Ladies Get Paid and this year’s Summit co-host, told the story of how she built a network of 30,000 women and how it almost ended when a group of men-rights activists sued them.

Don’t make it count: why you don’t need 1 million community members
Severin Matusek, host & co-founder at co-matter, talked about why getting a few hundred people to care and participate in your project is worth more than a million followers.

Bringing back the magic of intimate conversations
Travis Hollingsworth, founder of Norn, shared the story how Norn transformed from a co-living network to a community of people bringing back meaningful conversations to our daily lives.

How a community of instant film fans helped make the Impossible, possible
Amy Heaton, Head of Community at Polaroid Originals, about the transition from a hardcore instant film community to a global brand.

How not to organize a community-led organizational change intervention
Laura Billings, community manager at UK’s Government Digital Services Team, about how a country-wide intervention slowly fell apart.

Use your human tone when selling ugly vegetables
Carolin Schiemer, co-founder of GRIM, about her learnings in creating a subscription service for imperfect vegetables.

How to use digital methods to map out clusters and communities online
Jakob Carstensen, anthropologist & co-founder at Backscatter, about the power of data visualization to map and understand people’s behavior.

What is social media activism?
Political cartoonist Khalid Albaih about how his cartoons reached millions during the Arab Spring.

Participants

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Future living labs, co-living organizations, investors and sharing economy startups such as IKEA’s SPACE10, London’s Backed.VC, Copenhagen’s CPH Village, co-living platform LifeX and GRIM, a startup fighting food waste by delivering boxes of ugly, organic & seasonal fruits.

🗳️ Government, city communes and civil society startups such as the community builders behind the UK’s governments website gov.uk, public servants of the city of Copenhagen or startups like Civocracy that improve the dialog between communities and government authorities.

🚩 Ecosystem organizations such as Estonia’s Lift99, Tallinn Startup Week, Startup Norway and the Oslo Business Region, each on their own a flagship organization behind the Nordic tech community.

🔗 Blockchain platforms such as State of Dapps (Berlin), MakerDAO (Copenhagen), Reebo (Berlin), Zeppelin (Buenos Aires)and CryptoWomenCPH, bringing people together across the blockchain and decentralization movements.

🤓 Creative, design, strategy, data and innovation experts from places such as Stockholms’s ReformAct, London’s Protein, Copenhagen’s Untold, IOVIA and think.dk, data visualization company Backscatter and Eskild Hansen Design Studios.

🏠 Co-working spaces such as Oslo’s House of Innovation, Republikken, DINAMO10 and SoCentral, both of them ecosystems on their own supporting and empowering innovators.

💎 The people who bring people together at global brands and startups such as Polaroid Originals, Virgin, Fishbrain, Sanofi, Pixsy, Carlsberg, Conferize, Red Bull and Amnesty International.

🌎 Non-profit and youth organizations such as DeltagerDanmark that works with schools, foundations, municipalities, companies and labor unions to foster a more participatory, democratic and inclusive society, and OpenVRT, an association that empowers Belgium’s young media creatives.

Feedback

“ It is rare to have an intimate gathering like this, full of ideas from different sectors and countries. I couldn’t believe the diversity — from nonprofits, businesses, governments, and investors — all exploring how groups form and the potential significance behind building them today.”

“In the last 10 years of attending conferences and summits almost monthly, the Community Leadership Summit was certainly one of my favorites. I really appreciate how much time was allocated to workshops and discussions with the other attendees. The diversity of the audience and the active participation of everyone made the day valuable, interesting and inspiring.”

“It was really refreshing to connect with such an international group of people that generally seemed really sharp within their respective areas of work.”

“I thought the diversity of the attendees themselves brought so much value to this event — people from many different backgrounds, nationalities, levels in their career, genders/sexualities, roles, etc, but all united around the same questions.”

“I certainly came away with plenty to think about and with a fresh idea of what community means to me in both a professional and personal sense.”

Are you with us?

The next Summit will take place in early 2019. Make sure to RSVP and we’ll let you know as soon as date and location are fixed.

Last but not least, a big thank you to the team that helped make this Summit become a reality: Emily McDonnell, Natalie Torbett, Fauve Altman, Claire Wasserman, Sebastian Weinmann, the team at Techfestival and all the amazing speakers, participants, organizations and teams that contributed to it.

The Highlights from This Year’s Community Leadership Summit was originally published in co — matter on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

From co-living platforms to creative agencies, here’s a preview of the people and organizations that will join us at this year’s Community Leadership Summit, September 7 in Copenhagen.

UPDATE: a lot more people joined us since this post was initially published. It’s now updated with new organizations on August 28, they are:

Investors Backed.VC (London), blockchain networks Zeppelin (Buenos Aires) and Reebo (Berlin), fishing platform Fishbrain (Stockholm), co-working spaces Republikken (CPH) and DINAMO10 (Portugal), change makers think.dk (CPH) and healthcare firm Sanofi (CPH).

Welcome on board! 🎉

Scroll down for the full list of teams and organizations joining the Summit.

If you aren’t sure if the Summit is for you let us help you with an update on the status quo. The lowdown so far:

• Two weeks to go until September 7
• We’re 75% booked, 15 seats remaining
• Participants coming from 18 countries

A hyper diverse group of people is coming together bringing a ton of experience and best practices to the table. They are leading, growing and enabling communities at places like:

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Future living labs, co-living organizations, investors and sharing economy startups such as IKEA’s SPACE10, London’s Backed.VC, Copenhagen’s CPH Village, co-living platform LifeX and GRIM, a startup fighting food waste by delivering boxes of ugly, organic & seasonal fruits.

🗳️ Government, city communes and civil society startups such as the community builders behind the UK’s governments website gov.uk, public servants of the city of Copenhagen or startups like Civocracy that improve the dialogue between communities and government authorities.

🚩 Ecosystem organizations such as Estonia’s Lift99, Tallinn Startup Week, Startup Norway and the Oslo Business Region, each on their own a flagship organization behind the Nordic tech community.

🔗 Blockchain platforms such as State of Dapps (Berlin), MakerDAO (Copenhagen), Reebo (Berlin), Zeppelin (Buenos Aires)and CryptoWomenCPH, bringing people together across the blockchain and decentralization movements.

🤓 Creative, design, strategy, data and innovation experts from places such as Stockholms’s ReformAct, Antwerp’s Innovationwall, Copenhagen’s Untold, IOVIA and think.dk, data visualization company Backscatter and Eskild Hansen Design Studios.

🏠 Co-working spaces such as Oslo’s House of Innovation, Republikken, DINAMO10 and SoCentral, both of them ecosystems on their own supporting and empowering innovators.

💎 The people who bring people together at global brands and startups such as Polaroid Originals, Virgin, Fishbrain, Sanofi, Pixsy, Carlsberg, Conferize, Red Bull and Amnesty International.

🌎 Non-profit and youth organizations such as DeltagerDanmark that works with schools, foundations, municipalities, companies and labor unions to foster a more participatory, democratic and inclusive society, and OpenVRT, an association that empowers Belgium’s young media creatives.

Are you coming?

The Community Leadership Summit brings people from across the world together to explore how communities can make an impact.

15 seats are still available. Apply now and tell us why you should be a part of this conversation. Forward this to a friend who you think should come.

We look forward to seeing you in Copenhagen.

Who’s coming to this year’s Community Leadership Summit? was originally published in co — matter on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The founder of Ladies Get Paid will join us on September 7 to co-host this year’s Summit in Copenhagen.

Ladies Get Paid is an online network and organization that seeks to close the wage and leadership gap though career development. Started in 2016 as a series of meetups in New York City, it has grown to 30,000 members in all 50 US states and more than 60 countries.

Full disclosure, I’ve been a huge fan of Ladies Get Paid from the get go. It’s one of the most inspiring communities I know, connecting women around the world over a shared purpose and empowering each other to make a change.

Claire will make an invaluable contribution to the Summit by sharing her expertise and passion for building communities with a purpose.

Welcome Claire! To find out more about Ladies Get Paid and join the network have a look at their website, upcoming events, Instagram and podcast.

The Community Leadership Summit takes place on September 7 2018 as part of Techfestival in Copenhagen. You can still apply to join us here: http://techfestival.co/event/community-leadership-summit

Say hello 👋 to Claire Wasserman as a co-host of this year’s Community Leadership Summit was originally published in co — matter on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.