Wait, I just reached 150 students JUST for may.. ..
Wow.
If there is an upside to this pandemic it’s that lot’s of people are either spinning up businesses from their fiscal payments that they are getting from being furloughed or their $1200 US trump cheques.
Even the 40 million americans that are now unemployed are retooling and are eager to take this time to learn some new skills for this potential new world — lots of those jobs are never coming back as we transition to a life after pandemics.
Personally I don’t see anything changing much for the next few years when it comes to retail and the way we used to go to places to ‘shop’ or ‘hang out’ — I think those social groups are going to be much smaller for a little while.
5g is perfectly positioned from a speed perspective and if we remove the latency and lag of live streaming so it’s high quality then we just become our own personal television portal pages connected to the web.
One of my dreams for blockchain when communities came along was to build the 150 group which was always gonna be centered around a tribe of one hundred and fifty people that were known to each other, that worked together, that shared virtual space with each other.
What I did not see or plan was that people might wanna do that around ONE TOPIC but that’s just what happened this month. I literally in the space of four weeks onboarding through my courses and training one hundred and fifty students to training about video and streaming and the best thing is my course is only quarter of the way complete.
I’ve been thinking about ways to onboard some of those (hopefully all!) people to a community group on a blockchain. I’m thinking a free course might help them get over here and get posting, maybe once they see the value of having immutable blog that they don’t have to pay hosting for they can share their successes, shows and maybe build a community around this one thing.
I think I was over thinking the diversity part before, or maybe I wasn’t thinking of it at all and just hoped they would be awesome non toxic people who got along, craved connection and learning and were kind and compassionate about all levels of skill along the way — after all, we are all on the life journey together right?
And remember, this was ONE MONTH.
My next step is to create MANY communities around the 150 Mantra, I think that’s going to be the guiding principle, literally groups of the Dunbar number for each piece of software or element we are focusing on so that we have great back and forth dialog and become a rock solid space on the web for information about the topic.
Other sites are great like reddit and quora but they don’t have much SOUL, it’s all academic and ‘this is better than that’ — it does not really have a social component like I know these blockchain communities could have.
They are perfect for experimentation, comments, feedback, discussion and sharing the wins so why not use them as such? The more I have little wins like this the more I realise that the desire for a frontend and an app are super strong and actually we don’t need all the whizzbang stuff we just need a clean light UI to the community groups.
Also because of the recent events in 2020 of forks and drama I’m less aligned to the cult like behaviour of supporting a “name” of a chain. Yesterday saw the launch of polkadot, a web3 solution that sees things very much from a multi chain perspective instead of a maximalist approach.
I gel mentally with that more and it’s better for end users if they are constantly not having to go back and forth and be confused with forks or name changes. It’s like starting over for many people and we lose a bunch of people each time.
I’m not interested in trying to keep students up to date on the WHY or the DRAMA I just want a community space that I can use and foster longer form dialog on the web with some management tools, this technology gives me that but if something better comes along then we should be able to switch it out without much issue.
I think I’m gonna run with this and get it setup soon, then I can mail shot all my students with a new free course which they can learn about how to use the blockchain part and then I can start to add new course bits and share the wins and open up discussion — one of the great things about doing courses on third party platforms is that I can use ‘external resources’ so linking back to blockchain posts which build the community side.
I think it makes more sense to build those hardcore 150 virtual “fans” first and then build another product after that instead of just expecting people to just flood in, I think it forms a better basis of discussion and just this month alone the amount of interesting questions I’ve had from new streamers and ‘at home’ startups is helping me build out a better course.
Anyway, just wanted to share! :)
Multiple 150’s around the things I love, bring those students into those spaces for longer form engagement, build a frontend, put up ya new courses, everything just cycles, it’s great, it’s virtual, it’s an income and I get to play with the tools I love the most! ;)
Right, time to make this new video about using a virtual camera from OBS in ZOOM! :)
Peace,
__humble x
