The Community Nerd Project

A long time ago (before 2020), we'd often find ourselves in casual conversations in the most random of places - in a long line, on a train dashing between busy stops, squashed together on planes, etc. And in these casual conversations, we'd find ourselves asking complete strangers: What are you reading? What do you do for work? What does that entail?

And suddenly like no time at all had passed, the long line had vanished, the train was pulling up to the station, or we were being told to move our seats and tray tables back to the upright and locked position as we had been lost deep in discussion.

Despite being an introvert at heart, I voraciously miss these chance encounters. I miss the random moments to talk about the work I do and finding enlightening overlaps with complete strangers. I miss making unexpected connections.

Knowing that the best chance I have at talking to strangers in 2021 will likely be while standing in line to get a vaccine, I knew I had to find a way to replicate these chance collisions elsewhere. And so, I'm kicking off both a project and a resolution: The Community Nerd. I resolve to creating one piece of content a week and finding a way to bring back the random collisions. In the process, I want to share all sorts of nerdy bits and pieces hurtling around my brain in hopes that it inspires and engages others. And I hope to do it with the same level of excessive enthusiasm and passion as a variety of strangers have been subjected to, though replicating my usual hand and arm waving and quirky facial expressions might be a challenge.

So to kick this off, I'm going to answer the question I get asked the most: What does a community strategist and architect do?

Well, Stranger - that's an excellent question. It's my job to build digital environments where groups of people come together to learn, share, and collaborate on all sorts of topics. And I'll be the first to admit my job is a bit of a smorgasbord of a lot of different things. I wear all the hats. You've used the types of communities I build if you've ever Googled a problem with your car, looked up a review on TripAdvisor, or asked a question on Reddit.

At the core, building a successful digital environment requires a lot of understanding of how people behave, what drives us to do the things we do, and how digital design impacts behavior. We usually call this UI/UX - user interface and user experience. This is literally the stuff like considering how red or orange usually make us think of alerts or immediate action.

Community strategists and architects also help run these digital environments once they're built, and this requires us to be equal parts communicator, mediator, psychologist, and data nerd. We're always on the lookout for ways to engage the community, create member collisions, and resolve conflict. We spend a ton of time using our understanding of behavior to make sure the design, functionality, and strategy influence the behaviors we want members to exhibit. And then we use data analysis to stand back and understand it all - sometimes even digging into predictive analysis to see if we can predict what you'll do before you do it.

But, Stranger, I could talk forever about this stuff. Tell me about what you do.