Time Flies
Hi everyone – its been some time since I’ve written anything here. I’ll be honest, I’ve been feeling very down these past six months, and its been affecting my motivation to write anything here. For a while I’d been struggling to find the time to write things, but more recently I’ve found that has changed to actively resenting and not wanting to write.
To be candid, I’ve found myself more and more disillusioned with the state of the modern internet. I started writing because it made me happy, and I hoped in some way that someone out in the ether would benefit from reading what I had to say. More and more though I’ve found it harder and harder to feel excited about engaging with the one-way medium that is a newsletter, and for quite a while now its just not felt like its worth bothering with.
The fact that I’m writing this – somewhat predictably – is because I’ve had a recent change of heart. A couple of weeks ago I was at a conference and I felt a buzz of excitement that I haven’t felt in a long time – I felt the joy of creating something in person with a community of likeminded people again. I realised that what I want is to co-create with others, and I want to share and learn from and with others. And I want to do it in the first person, not just shouting into the void and hoping someone is listening.
And that brings us here – its time for something new.
This is my last post on Substack, and the last from Let’s Talk Communities of Practice. I love talking about Communities of Practice and I will no doubt continue to do so, but I don’t want to build newsletters, I want to build a community. I want a community built by people, for the benefit of people, not to feed tomorrows AI models. I want to co-create and do things that are new, and I want to experience that with other people.
So I get to announce my new project – By People For People. A social learning space for people who like to build communities with other people. To be clear, I will not be migrating all the subscribers of this newsletter over automatically, as that’s irritating and unfair. If you’d like to come join I’d love to see you there, and here’s what you can expect…
· I’ll still be writing - you’ll still get a regular blog from me 😊
· An online community space with other community people
· People driven experiences, both online and (hopefully) in person
· Several other ideas that may happen over the coming months
· Still a free offering – there may be new things in the future which we might decide can be paid for, but community will always be at no cost
If you’d like to sign up you can click the button below to see what is currently an extrordinarily minimum viable webpage – I will start getting back into the habit of posting things this week and starting to build out the community space. If you’d rather not, then you don’t need to do anything – from me though, thanks for reading these past few years, its meant a lot to know someone was listening and I hope at least some of it was useful 😊