World-building IRL
Engineering high-quality communities that don't break at scale
I’ve been writing this guide for the better part of a month. Please give me a high five next time you see me. I did it. It’s published. LFG.
This turned into a bit of a novel, so (to help manage expectations) I present a table of contents. If you plan to read this whole guide, I promise to not be offended if you need to pace yourself & take some breaks along the way. You’ve got this‼️🏃🏾♂️🏃♀️💨Table of Contents:
Preface
The Way Things Work™️
If everything is temporary, why build anything?
So you’ve decided to build. What’s next?
How to find great people
How to get people to show up
How to help people be the best versions of themselves
How to get great people to stick around
How to preserve “the quality” of a community at scale
Maximizing resource use at scale
Your only finite resources are time and energy (use them wisely!)
Less-finite resources — leveraging the community to build the community.
Whatever you do, it will be imperfect. Do it anyways.
Preface
World-building is something we associate with authors, cinematographers and video game designers — we constrain our creativity to fictional universes that exist behind screens or in the pages of books.
Choosing writing, film or coding as your world-building medium feels so… possible. Pick up a pencil, whip out your camera, learn game development — suddenly you can establish a whole reality where you get to make the rules, craft tidy storylines, and ✨curate the vibes✨.
Pouring our hearts into universes that are one step removed from reality is a wonderful outlet, but there will always be some emotional distance when a glass screen or paper boundary separates us from the world we create. It’s easy to forget that the world we wake up to, complain about, and exist in every day is a world we can influence.
If you ever feel tempted to give up on the real world, remember that this is where we have water gun fights, breathe forest air, eat awesome sandwiches, go dancing, and are brought to tears laughing with friends. We will always return to the messy and imperfect lives in front of us1, meaning they are worth directing our creativity towards.
Real-life actions are the most powerful world-building medium we have, and appreciating the true scope of your influence is the first step in building a world you are proud and excited to be part of.
This awareness led me to spend a lot of time joining, growing, and founding organizations and… social movements? Whatever you want to call “a group of people who come together to build a world better than the one we’re currently in”.
This work often feels like being on the cutting edge of research — starting with a hypothesis of “the way things could be”, casting that vision into a void, and persevering with nothing more than a belief in a version of reality that doesn’t exist yet.
While this can be lonely and terrifying at first, you’d be surprised at how quickly people will jump on an idea when it comes from a place of “I wish this existed”. We like to think our problems are unique, but most of us are exactly like other girls.
When these organizations gain momentum, the questions “Why does this work?” and “What are you doing that’s different?” come up often, and these questions make a lot of sense: from an outside perspective, it’s really hard to understand how SVP Teens grew from 8 to 85 kids in a month, why Socratica coworking sessions consistently attract people from ✨Downtown Toronto✨ to Waterloo, Ontario on Sunday mornings, or why 200-person UW Startups events now sell out in less than 24 hours (with 49% female attendees!) — from the outside, all we’re really doing is putting a bunch of people in a room. In fact from the outside, the incredible teams I’ve worked with have been under-resourced, our venues have been slightly harder to get to, and our food has been ✨minimalistic✨ (read: pizza served on napkins).
These stats are the highlight reel, and they are really exciting. What’s talked about less is what goes on behind the scenes — capturing and holding the attention of overcommitted-young-people long enough to accomplish anything is no easy task.
“Gut feelings” have guided a lot of my decision-making over the past few years, and while intuition is a totally valid (and shockingly effective) strategy for world-building, “Doing a vibe check” is a wholly unsatisfying answer to “Why does this work?” for anyone that wants to do anything similar. There is probably some value in writing it down.
This is my best attempt to codify what’s been goin’ on up there.
The Way Things Work™️
From anecdotal observation, I can *somewhat confidently* say that every organization lives and dies following roughly this cycle:
There’s a lurking dissatisfaction with “the way things are” in a certain environment.
People start verbalizing their desire to change, they come together, and they form a community around a certain shared vision of what the world should look like.
For a time this works really well! These are the glory days.
The community grows and grows. And grows… and grows? With more attention and success, everyone rushes to be a part of it. Being a part of it is “the cool thing to do”. FOMO is incredible.
Tasks become repetitive, monotonous, and stale. Work stops being exciting, organizers feel overwhelmed. The founding group loses interest, the sparkle dies.
Tasks are delegated, and in a last-ditch effort to save the sinking ship, new leadership comes in. In most cases (other than the rare case of someone truly special making it “the cool thing to do” again), the organization rides out its reputation, diluted to a shadow of what it once was, until it fizzles and ceases to exist.
The cycle repeats.
Pretty much everything in life is cyclical *something something… the moon… seasons… animal populations…*, and I think the rise and fall of various ideologies and groups of people is not only inevitable but necessary for progress. But if that’s true, what’s the point?
If everything is temporary, why build anything?
We tend to view companies and organizations like this:
With this mindset, the meteoric rises and catastrophic downfalls of social movements and corporations seem earth-shattering. We personify organizations to the point where we forget that under the layer of logos, there are people who go about their everyday lives. When one hype cycle comes to an end, people simply hop onto the next wave and reshuffle under new branding.
Each organization will have a finite lifespan, and each individual person will have their own timeline within that organization — we all change and grow and move on, and that’s ok. This means that succession planning, mentorship, and handoff should constant and expected daily processes rather than momentous torch-passing moments.
People saying their goodbyes doesn’t necessarily mean that the organization is failing, in decline, or any worse than it was when they joined. It’s often actually indicative of success — in that person’s life, the organization has served its purpose. Sticking around out of obligation makes things grow stale, idealizing “the way things were” distracts from the present, and being loyal to logos that no longer serve us is silly2.
Personal growth, ideas, and relationships persist — and compound — long past the lifespans of organizations and individual contributors.
This is what leads to long-term societal progress. Organizations are nothing more than idea-transporting vessels and friend-making machines.
So even if the vessel is temporary (which it definitely is, as all organizations are), build it anyway. This is not about the rise and fall of the branding you package your ideas behind — this is about adding your piece to the world you want to be a part of and enjoying the friendships and personal growth you experience along the way.
So you’ve decided to build. What’s next?
Here are the somewhat counterintuitive rules that I’ve learned through experimentation. No one really teaches you these things, but I’m going to give it my best shot.
Putting on my teacher hat.
1. How to find great people
TLDR: They are right in front of you.
When I was in grade 10, like many young Canadian nerds, I went to a summer enrichment program called SHAD. I cringe as I write this, but for the first time in my life, I felt I had found a place where I fit in — where the people weren’t just smart, but funny, ambitious, pursuing a huge variety of interests, and not letting themselves be put into boxes. People were just as likely to be tinkering with robots as they were to be performing in musical theatre (and more often than not, they would actively be pursuing both).
When I returned back to my hometown, the entire world outside of that socially-engineered environment felt dull. Everything I used to love had lost its sparkle. Like the melodramatic teenager I was, I moped around for several months, lamenting being separated from “my people”, convinced I’d never find them again.
At a SHAD reunion later that year, I expressed this feeling to a friend, to which they responded: “So? Make it better!”
Something clicked for me that day. There was no way that in my hometown of 350,000 people, there was no one who I could talk about big ideas with. I snapped out of it, and instead of moaning about how “all my favourite people” were elsewhere, I focused on finding the ones that were right in front of me. With an Instagram account and an intent to find great people locally, SVP Teens was able to fill the void that SHAD left behind. SHAD showed me that intense and vibrant and silly3 spaces could exist, and SVP Teens taught me that I could to will them into existence.
In my life today, I see the manifestation of the “there are no good people here” attitude most prevalently with Waterloo students and Canadians in general flocking to the United States. New York and San Francisco are ✨where the pretty people are ✨ — shiny, better, smarter, and cooler — moving to these places will make all your problems go away. While I can’t deny the magic of being surrounded by awesome people, the problem with everyone constantly chasing the hype is that it essentially turns us all into leeches — if 100% of people are focused on “finding where the best party is”, none of the parties will actually be fun. Communities die when everyone seeks to gain more than they hope to give.
I’ve also witnessed this with several fellowships and programs (and have caught myself feeling this way as well) — once you get accepted into something that was once the dream (usually because it was competitive to get into), you feel like it’s not all you painted it out to be. There are two ways to deal with this disappointment: keep searching for the next shiny thing because that’s where “your people” will be, or double down and believe in the magic within the people right in front of you. If you’re constantly searching and feeling unstable, unsettled, or like you don’t belong, you may find that choosing to stay in one place long enough to build the magic right where you are is the only path that puts an end to this cycle4.
Our Canadian king said it best:
I still absolutely spend time going to other places to meet great people, and I get a lot of energy from doing so. The difference now is what happens when I come home — because I’ve invested heavily in the communities around me, when internships and leadership retreats come to an end I’m just as excited to come back as I was to go explore.
Everywhere I go, I feel I’m surrounded by kind, ambitious nerds who care about the world and want to have a fun time. There are great people everywhere. It makes me so incredibly optimistic about the future.
2. How to get people to show up
TLDR: Prioritize the experience of the people who DO show up
If you have a disappointing turnout, don’t focus your energy on the people who aren’t there. Don’t lecture the people in a call about how attendance is important, and don’t spend the first 40 minutes waiting for people to trickle into your event. Everyone in attendance will feel their time is wasted, and that will probably be the last time they attend.
Instead, focus on the experience of the people who did show up, and have so much fun that the people who skipped feel FOMO for not being there. In your post-event marketing, show people laughing and having a good time, and set it to fun music. Don’t beg, stay winning. This is how you get returners coming back again and again, and this is how you get people to prioritize showing up next time.
Word-of-mouth marketing is powerful, and people will tell their friends how they really feel (whether they have a great time or an awful time). How you adapt to slightly-disappointing circumstances is the most powerful marketing tool you have, so think quickly on your feet and play the long game.
3. How to help people be the best versions of themselves
TLDR: “Feeling like you’ve found your people” is rarely about the specific selection of people in a room and often about the social norms governing the way you interact with each other.
It’s comforting having a shiny vision of far-away places where the people are exactly who you want to spend your time around — but this blatantly ignores the fact that most of the people you interact with are tailoring their external personas to adapt to the social norms in given environments. Want people to be more authentic, not flex on you, and to have a real conversation? Take the first leap. People who think others are boring are usually just projecting — the secret to having great conversations is being a great conversationalist, and most people have really interesting things to share if you know the right questions to ask.
When we leave the house each day, we emotionally “suit up” — putting on an external personality that all but our closest friends get to interact with. Most of us choose the personality-equivalent of a grey trenchcoat, because grey trenchcoats are the safe and sensible option that no one will question.
Social engineering is the ‘vibe-curation’ equivalent of asking people to check their trenchcoats at the door — when the spaces we enter (parties, companies, and even countries) invite us to celebrate who we are under the layers of protection we’ve carefully compiled, we can all connect meaningfully with each other. All people are interesting — it’s a place’s job to make people feel comfortable enough to stop pretending they aren’t.
How do we help others do this?
Large scale community organizing / vibe curation:
(Watch on 2x speed, start at 13:45)
Normal conversations:
My go-to questions when I meet people for the first time:
Tell me your life story in 5 minutes or less (or more if that stresses you out)!
What’s a problem you really care about?
What’s the craziest thing that’s ever happened to you?
What's something that always brings a smile to your face?
Sillier questions:
Let me guess if you’re an oldest / middle / younger / only child (okay so this isn’t really a question but is a fun game to play with groups who only slightly know each other).
What's the weirdest food combination you've tried and actually enjoyed?
If you were stranded on a deserted island, what three things would you want to have with you?
What's your favourite dance move? (and show it to me, obviously that’s where this was headed).
Crowdsourced:
If you could take a year off to do anything, what would it be?
What are you “bottom 10%” at?
Share your recommendations (recommendations are my love language)! Jaclyn Chan
If you’re not feeling creative:
“What about you?” can take you really far. Remember to ask as many questions as you answer, this is a conversation not an interview.
The most important thing is to not take yourself too seriously. Someone always has to take the lead in making people drop their guard, and if you can get the hang of consistently setting a tone that’s silly, honest, and vulnerable, you will have great conversations wherever you go.
4. How to get great people to stick around
TLDR: Let people leave freely, but give them a reason to stay
Let’s talk about commitment! 🤭
With most organizations I’ve joined, I’ve found that once I enter a role, I’m expected to commit something like 10 hours a week to a volunteer position. For the first little bit I’m moderately bought in, but I get tired of doing the same thing over and over again. I get to the point where I’ve developed enough skills to do the job well, but I’m so bored that I stop trying and I eventually quit because I want my time back.
As a leader I’ve watched this occur from the other side: I’m hiring for a role and there is a candidate who is SO awesome, perhaps even overqualified for what they’re being asked to do. I am THRILLED, we have a dream team. What’s less thrilling is watching them quickly get bored — they become unresponsive, drop the ball on a few deliverables, and my entire relationship with them becomes chasing them down to complete ✨tasks✨. A lot of resentment builds up on both sides of this nagging relationship, and the work that’s outputted is mediocre.
Everyone in these scenarios is losing — the person asking for help, the person recruited to do the work, and all the people would have benefitted from the work being done well. If we return to the idea that organizations are nothing more than idea-transporting vessels and friend-making machines, this organization has failed.
To diagnose why people leave:
They are not having fun
They don’t have enough autonomy or ownership
Their work doesn’t feel meaningful
They feel trapped by commitment
There are dumb rules
To address these problems:
Have fun! (but for real)
If you think working hard is the opposite of having fun, you’re doing it wrong. We often make the mistake of prioritizing efficiency over relationships and stop being silly under stress, but fun is the glue that holds us all together and is SO important. If you’re not having fun leading a volunteer organization for which you are unpaid, genuinely what are you doing? If you or the team are not enjoying yourselves, that is your number one red flag. Your attendees/customers/whoever-you’re-building-for will feel it. Don’t think about quitting as step one, think about how you can make whatever it is that you’re doing fun again.
Stop “pretend delegating”. Give real ownership.
While some people like being given piece-meal tasks and completing them one by one to be approved by an authority figure, my hypothesis is that most people thrive when given a loosely defined direction and permission to do what they think is best. Giving other people true ownership and autonomy is so scary, but ambitious and creative people generally don’t enjoy being babysat or told what to do and will leave if you don’t give them the chance to shine. Stop getting in their way.
You, pretending to delegate (and ready to swoop in at a moment’s notice) You are surrounded by incredibly competent people who are eager to be trusted to do a good job. You are probably underutilizing their talent and enthusiasm, limiting their personal growth (and your own), and I can almost guarantee you’re leaving yourself overworked and burnt out. Believe in their competence, don’t try to frantically swoop in and save them when minor problems occur, give them real responsibility, and be a “genius-maker”.
I am not generally a podcast person, but my mom made me listen to this one and it was seriously worth it.
Furthermore, don’t hand off a sinking ship. You should be pulling people in to do the work that gets you excited, not the work that makes you groan. For maximum personal and organizational growth, you should be doing handoff the second others are ready for more, even if you’re emotionally attached to the work they’re eager to do.
This philosophy has pushed me outside my comfort zone as a leader — as I hand off the work that I previously thought was my ‘upper ceiling of leadership,’ I’m forced to level up. I learn how to teach and coach others on how to teach and coach others on how to teach and coach others…. the learning never stops, it keeps me on my toes, and I stay excited by the novelty of the work I’m doing too.Only do meaningful work.
Sometimes there comes a task no one wants to do.
As leaders, we often jump to the classic two motivational tools — rewards and consequences. Instead, I’d like to argue that our first response should be figuring out why no one wants to do it in the first place. People enjoy doing work that is meaningful, and when they feel they are being challenged, learning, and contributing value, they do a good job.
If there is a task that is being completed halfheartedly, the cause is usually that it doesn’t feel meaningful or important to the people who are being asked to do it — your response should not be thinking about how to motivate them to do it anyways, but questioning if it’s worth doing at all. Trust your team. If you know there is real value in doing the work and can communicate that value, it’s usually pretty easy to get the work prioritized.
An example of this in my own life was choosing to run @uwstartups as an Instagram account rather than an official club. The objectives I hoped to achieve (distribute existing opportunities and help people make friends) didn’t require the hoop-jumping most leaders subject themselves to.
Here’s a list of things I didn’t want to do:
A list of things Joss didn’t (and still doesn’t) want to do, 2023. These things didn’t feel meaningful enough to be worth my time or the time of anyone I’ve been working with, and every limitation of existing as an Instagram account has been extremely possible to overcome through partnerships. By being a bit creative, we are staying super lean while keeping our ratio of energy expended : value created in check.
Make everything opt-out by default and keep timelines short
Don’t hire people for roles, hire them for jobs to be done. Your “events coordinator” will likely feel trapped in their commitment. The 10 people you message to “help organize a one-off event” will make great friends, feel super engaged, and be grateful for the opportunity.
Formal applications are typically not good signals for how someone will actually perform in a volunteer role — to mitigate your own disappointment, all you have to do to figure out who should be given more active leadership roles is pay attention to who is doing it anyways. If someone is consistently engaged within the community (keep a particular eye out for introverts and people from underrepresented groups), that is the biggest indicator of future engagement.
We call this approach “effort-gating” — start with as low of a barrier to entry as possible (“merit” is not considered when approving people to attend events), pay attention to who shows up consistently, and promote from within! The people who lean in the most get the most benefits. Additionally, people should always feel like they can be honest about their capacity to commit to things and should be able to walk away without facing negative reactions. Life happens, the only expectation is honesty and clear communication from both you and the people you’re working with.By taking this approach, you get the outcomes you want (great events, marketing, etc.), you get to work with fantastic people (who might be afraid to make ambiguous long-term commitments), and with everything you do, every single person in the room is there because they want to be. The impact this has on ✨the vibes✨ can not be overstated. Enthusiasm > Experience.
This also applies to recurring calendar RSVPs — never assume that a recurring RSVP is an honest reflection of someone’s intention to attend. No matter how long you’ve been a part of our community, every coworking session and event we run requires a fresh RSVP. People get comfortable and complacent — for your own sanity, make them opt in every single time (even if the only reason is to ensure you’re ordering the right amount of food).All rules should be both defensible and enforced
Sometimes people think they’re being sneaky and try to work on school at our Socratica coworking sessions (which is not allowed, because it’s a space to work on high-effort passion projects that normally get de-prioritized). First of all, you’re not sneaky. Second of all, as an organizer, what’s the best way to deal with this?
The best way to enforce rules is to treat people like adults. ”No working on school or work because those are the rules!” is a lot less compelling than “When you started coming to Socratica, is school really what you wanted to use the space for?”
Sometimes we make so much progress that we forget what got us there — even the best of us think we can cheat the rules (I too have been tempted to work on school at Socratica). Almost always, organizers and long-time attendees will begin to think they’re above the law — the correction for this is reminding ourselves that our example sets the culture and that people will only buy in if we do.
We should all continuously question rules (including our own rules), but if you come across a rule that seems dumb, try to understand why it was created before removing it. You’ll either be reminded that it exists to serve you (and that by cheating it you are really cheating yourself), or you’ll realize it’s not defensible (meaning you can’t find a realistic worst-case scenario that explains why it exists). If a rule is not defensible and/or not worth enforcing, it shouldn’t exist. Changing rules is a longer-term strategy than breaking them.
Conversations I’ve had as I’ve organized various events. Finally, don’t stress too much. Making and enforcing rules often detracts from fun, and future-scenario-anxiety spiralling is helpful but only to a point. Sometimes you need to just believe that people are generally good and that future you can be trusted to make sound decisions.
5. How to preserve “the quality” of a community at scale
TLDR: Stop panic-gatekeeping! There is no hard line between “us” and “them”.
“How do we preserve the quality of the community?”
This question comes up time and time again.
Without even realizing it, many people’s gut interpretation of this question is actually “How do we protect the community from ‘low-quality people’ getting in?”. We’ve all had these feelings, and especially if you’ve seen a community go off the rails before, this primal instinct to protect your special place is extremely well-intentioned.
It would be ridiculous to make the claim that all people are the same, and it’s true that if you let masses of people flood into a community with no plan, the vibes will shift. The correction here is that the influx of people being “of lesser quality” is a misdiagnosis — the real problem is actually a lack of planning on how to integrate them successfully.
In a community-building context, we often get in our own way by drawing a hard line between “us” and “them” — we forget that the people around us are full of potential. Whether you’re running a hackathon, celebrating your culture, advocating for animal rights, creating safe spaces for women, or just trying to meet interesting friends, frantically trying to preserve “the quality” of a community by keeping others out typically plays out like this:
Organizers and activists work extremely hard to share our vision of a better world
When people cautiously take the initial steps into understanding, we get territorial, tell them they’re not doing enough, prescribe conflicting versions of “the right way to get involved”, and criticize them for being imperfect
They get scared away (often into the arms of people whose ideal visions of the world are polar-opposite to our own)
We get frustrated that “no one cares”, while they feel completely attacked and rarely try to see the world from our point of view again
Us, bravely defending our special place from the low-quality evil people that will destroy it if given the chance
Communities don’t die at scale when you “dilute all the good people”, they die when you stop believing in levelling-up the people around you.
Rather than stressing about how we enforce the boundary between “us” and “them”, we should be allocating most of our brainpower to helping the people around us grow.
The ASU Charter Statement is one of the best things I’ve ever read:
ASU is a comprehensive public research university, measured not by whom it excludes, but by whom it includes and how they succeed; advancing research and discovery of public value; and assuming fundamental responsibility for the economic, social, cultural and overall health of the communities it serves.
In a world that needs more nurses, teachers, engineers, researchers, and more, ASU doesn’t aspire to “keep acceptance rates low”. Rather than equating quality with exclusivity, they measure success by optimizing for “net value to society”, and this means investing in as many people as possible.
So how do we help other people level up?
Hold mainstream spaces where everyone is invited
Communities like Women In Engineering are necessary and visible places where people can seek refuge and support, but when women leave these safe environments, they go back to a world that is hostile. Conversations about “how hard it is to be a woman in engineering” need to be reaching the other 87% of engineers who identify as men.
The world will remain hostile if we exclude majority populations from conversations about how to make it better. A lot of this exclusion is implicit and due to awkwardness — even if men are technically allowed to join DEI conversations, they are typically too afraid of how they’ll be perceived to ever initiate a meaningful discussion about workplace culture. Because events run by Women In Engineering are obviously not going to attract men, we need to be initiating important conversations in every single environment we’re part of.
A big callout here to not to engineer social environments where the dominant population will feel punished for their inclusion efforts (e.g. men invite so many women into a community that they themselves are forced out). “More women” does not mean “less men” — great men are friends with great women, and they are necessary allies in building the world we want to be a part of. Believe in them. We want to align incentives in such a way that prioritizing diversity and inclusion is win-win, because it is5, and because we need all hands on deck. This distinction is subtle but so important.Make yourself easy to talk to
Whether or not you’re a StraightWhiteMan™️, many people who try to be allies are trapped here:
I’ve been this person and squirmed with discomfort watching this person. Whether or not you want to make yourself a resource (and you absolutely don’t have to), I’ve found declaring myself as “a person to ask dumb questions to” has resulted in many great conversations with people who are genuinely interested in hosting welcoming spaces for others and want to learn how. Most people are just waiting to be invited to the conversation.
Times I’ve been impressed:When conducting an interview, I asked a candidate “how they would make tech spaces feel safe for underrepresented people”. They gave a subpar answer, but a few days later they sent a follow-up email with a list of fantastic ideas for inclusion — unprompted. After being asked to think about it, they kept thinking and thinking and helped me level up too. We need more brains on this.
After posting Social Engineering 101 (How to not be Cringe), several people reached out and we have had great discussions since. Many of these conversations resulted in longer-term friendships and collaborations.
Rather than criticize things like performative activism and asking dumb questions, we could view them as initial signals that someone is interested in taking further action and make those pathways to further action accessible. We need to be cheering for people, even if their progress is painfully slow.
Erase the line between “us” and “them”.
The only reason “we” are part of “us” is because someone believed in us and extended an invitation to be part of something special — we can do the same for others.
To typecast people as “not-values-aligned” forces them into that role, and to expect others to act with an understanding of our lived experiences is a big ask. There is only one way towards the world we want to see — and it’s not“hoping that people randomly start caring about things they’ve never been exposed to and are somehow able to come up with effective solutions without talking to people who actually understand the problems”.
Whether you’re running a hackathon or a volunteering organization, everyone is somewhere along a sliding scale of values alignment, buy-in, and skill development. Most people are not evil, “less-skilled people” are only really a few hundred hours and a confidence boost away from becoming “highly-skilled people” and pretty much everyone in the entire world shows up to things because it’s what their friends are doing.
You’ll never know why someone is supporting your movement or attending your event (and it doesn’t matter). We do not need to be guessing at motivations, we need to be measuring outcomes.
You, erasing the line between “us” and “them”.
Design escalation paths for people to level up
Everyone starts with a different level of experience. In the context of hosting spaces for others, here’s a general framework that outlines how most people evolve over time when given progressive leadership opportunities within a community.
Sample host progression, including descriptions, things organizers should watch out for, and how they can best support people at various levels Curating these escalation paths and knowing what to look out for means you can manage the development of several people simultaneously (and give them the opportunity to help each other level up too).
Maximizing resource use at scale
So I got tired of writing things as a “how-to” guide and figured I’d wrap this up by talking less about ✨vibes✨ and more about the tools you have at your disposal when world-building IRL.
Your only finite resources are time and energy
(use them wisely!)
In almost all scenarios, the set of resources available to support a good thing at scale is a lot more malleable than you think. Sometimes resources are finite-ish (e.g. only having the funds to hire 2 employees), but you can always raise more money, find more people, or get a bigger room. Your only truly finite resources are time and energy.
What if we built a world where instead of defensively locking people into commitments, we focused on making it super fun to stick around? What if instead of spending our time on gatekeeping, we instead invested it into figuring out how to actually support more people?
If we viewed organizations as what they actually are — loose collections of people clustered around an ideological point (with a fuzzy barrier keeping them together rather than strictly defined circles of “in” and “out”), we would be a lot more effective at idea-transporting, friend-making, and world-building.
Less-finite resources — leveraging the community to build the community.
Your time and energy might be finite, but what about the ever-growing swarm of people trying join in on your fun? Instead of viewing that as a threat, view it as what it is — a huge accumulation of potential energy.
A great example of this in the real world is how Reddit leverages its user base to assist with moderation. While most social media platforms have struggled with moderation, Reddit recognized that the only thing that scales with users are users and that when given the right infrastructure, users could take ownership of curating the spaces they wanted to be part of. So Reddit built the structure, and a huge community of volunteer “Mods” formed, each of whom takes ownership of setting and enforcing specific rules within their own Subreddits. Additionally, users take ownership over the feed hierarchy and can influence how highly content is displayed via upvotes and downvotes, incentivizing people to share high-quality content if they want it to be seen. These social mechanisms allow Reddit to save 3.4 million dollars per year in moderation costs.
Reddit shows that momentum is not something to be feared, but something to be harnessed. This potential energy is not inherently good or bad — all that can be said is that it’s powerful.
If you find yourself with an overwhelming amount of interest, your job is to design and implement infrastructure (social, technical, etc.) to harness this energy and turn it into something productive (this might look like incrementally teaching people how to lead, supplying them with tools, raising more money, finding larger spaces, etc.).
This is why we call it “social engineering”. 😁
In Waterloo, we have yet to hit the upper limit on enthusiasm for the creative spaces we’re holding. This means we are constantly thinking about how to optimize our system to efficiently convert energy into value for the constantly-growing community of people who want to be a part of something special. What works at one scale has to be reimagined for the next — this keeps us on our toes but is all part of the fun.
Next up is figuring out how we decentralize community organization (ooh! decentralization! buzzword alert! 🤩) so that anyone can initiate anything they want and be guaranteed the same friend-making and idea-transporting goodness we’ve been getting when we put a bunch of people in a room.
We envision a world where believing in the power of the people around us results in a population of creatives, engineers, and leaders that believe in themselves and each other, and who have the tools to incorporate inclusion and ✨good vibes✨ into everything they do.
Stay tuned.6 😁
Whatever you do, it will be imperfect.
Do it anyways.
I’m typically around 80% happy with most things I put into the world — and I think that’s about where it should be. Having some room for improvement means you’re doing things that are challenging enough to be worth your time, and waiting for something to be at 100% means it will never see the light of day7.
There are days when you cry because everything feels pointless (and you question why you try so hard), and days when you cry alongside the people who tell you the positive impact you’ve had in their lives (this is why you try so hard). World-building IRL is highly emotional — it is rewarding, and it hurts, because of how much you care.
When things go well, remember to celebrate. When they go… less well, don’t beat yourself up. It’s tempting to try to pre-solve problems that don’t exist yet, but let future you worry about future problems — any rule you set now will undoubtedly be unwritten, and whoever is in charge at that point in time will have way more resources and context to solve it.
Take care of yourself.
Breathe.
If you have a team, pull them in as much as you can, whether it’s sharing the wins 💯 or reflecting honestly on where you need to course correct for next time (and there will be a next time, we are playing the long game). The learning you gain is valuable whether you succeed or fail (and almost always it will be somewhere in between), but remembering that most things are done better together will take you far.
In our IRL world-building endeavours, we are experimentalists. We are on the cutting edge of research, iterating step-by-step toward our vision of a better world that doesn’t quite exist yet.
THIS is how we build the world we are proud and excited to be a part of.
The end. Finally.8
No comment on the Metaverse 😳
In a bad way.
In a good way!
With the caveat that of course some environments are toxic and you shouldn’t tolerate places or people that make you feel small, undermine your confidence, or take advantage of you.
When diversity is celebrated, we can all show up as more authentic versions of ourselves. When we support each other, we all have a bigger and happier pool of colleagues, friends, and collaborators for the things we dream up. A jarring statistic is that nearly 40% of female engineering graduates either quit or never enter the industry, often citing toxic culture as the reason for leaving — subsidizing years of education and then not following through on protecting these women is a system inefficiency that everyone is paying for. PLUS companies with more diverse workforces perform better. When we support each other we ALL WIN.
AND reach out if you have thoughts!! This is a call for brainstorming.
The sheer amount of time I’ve been writing this guide is evidence of that 🤡
Proud of you for making it this far. Gold star for you: ⭐️ 😁 🫶 👍 ✨
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Truely inspiring thank you.
Brilliant :)