Open Note to Readers: on Hacking Communities
About two years after first publishing it (and validating its value), I released a printed version of my book. But anything we print these days must be paired with a fluid (easy-to-update) media.
You can now get a printed copy of Hacking Communities (if you prefer paper > ebook).
Two years after first publishing it, the printed version aims to make it more accessible to seasoned and emerging community leaders around the world.
It’s been two years, and a lot has changed (for all of us). Personally, I went from being a nomadic founder and serial community builder to becoming a (mostly) NYC-based writer, indie researcher and mom-to-be. While the foundational principles and frameworks laid out in the book stay relevant, it requires ongoing updates due to the emerging nature of its topic (reinventing communities in an ever-changing world).
To contextualize where Hacking Communities fits into this new world, new us, I wrote an Author’s Note prefacing the book’s printed version.
Sharing a (somewhat) unabridged version of it below.
Author’s (Open) Note to the Book Reader’s Community
Note: the contents below are adapted from the Author’s Note (pg. 13-16) on the printed version of Hacking Communities.
This book will help you develop yourself as a better community leader.
While the title alludes to tips and tricks for community building, its content means to equip emerging leaders with the foundations to build self-sustaining communities. It features personal stories, research studies, and creative metaphors collected during my journey to becoming a community leader.
In writing Hacking Communities, I found no shortcut to community building. No quick hacks to going from zero to belonging.
As put on page 240 of the Kindle Edition:
"I found that you need more than a framework to build a community—you need to step into your journey home, towards your most authentic self."
This book is about becoming the leader who enables communities to emerge.
Now and Then
We have been through world-changing events since this book was published (in 2020), from the COVID-19 lockdown to the post-pandemic reality (which we are still figuring out).
In the past two years, we've witnessed the emergence of thousands of virtual communities, followed by accelerated growth in tools and tricks aimed at explaining how to manage them. We've seen the blast of web3 communities into the world (or the metaverse) while investors and corporations, from large to small, tried to catch up (e.g., Facebook changing their name to Meta).
Lastly, we've also seen a growth in the quality and number of community-related executive positions, expanding from Community Managers to Heads and VPs of Community - and Chief Community Officers.
Fun fact: I was given the CCO title in late 2016 when FlySpaces acquired my first startup (8Spaces). At the time, I wasn't flattered. I genuinely thought they'd given me any C-title because they had no idea what to make of me - I admit I underestimated my then-CEO being ahead of his time.
Learnings
Since this book was published, I spent two years developing a community-led educational program that welcomed 288 community professionals who held senior leadership positions at companies like Meta, Canva, and Singularity University and plenty of founders and indie community builders (including web3). As the founding Director of the On Deck Community Builders Fellowship (ODCB), my goal was to carve community as a career path. In doing so, I found multiple ways of being a community professional. Just like Marketing, Business Development, and other business departments, Community has to be seen in its full complexity and broken down into multiple areas, from Strategy and Operations, to Growth (and many in between, including my favorites: Community Design and Architecture).
I jumped from publishing this book to interviewing over a thousand candidates to join that program while developing an educational curriculum for Community Building alongside industry leaders and experts. In this process, I further validated and developed several concepts within this book.
I am sharing below some rounded-up concepts and frameworks I've developed since we first published this book. Note that these concepts are alive and will continue to be developed and shared in this newsletter.
Growth is a consequence of a clear Identity and effective Connectedness.
While Growth is the shiny object many companies are after when hiring for a community department, it is but a consequence of a well-defined Identity (which relates to Community Development, Design, and Branding), followed by well-established Connectedness (enabled by Community Architecture and Operations).
The 5 Ps of Community: a better Community Design framework
Starting a community departs from identifying, first, its People and their Purpose. Once those are defined, it is crucial to establish the means of interaction between them: what are they committing to do (Participation), how often do they gather (Programming), and where do they stay in touch on an ongoing basis (Platform).
People (Who): Customer segments, main criteria for identity and belonging.
Purpose (Why): What they gather for or aim to achieve (individually or collectively).
Participation (How): Their commitment: what actions they agree to take to deliver value to each other. What defines a key contributor in the context of your community?
Programming (What): Gatherings, events, and activities that bring them together. How often, where do they meet, and what are they doing during this time?
Platform (What): How do they stay in touch between gatherings? A platform should be an evergreen space where members can find each other (or resources) at any time needed, either virtual or physical space (a forum, library, or even cafeteria).
If you can't see the 5Ps clearly, it might mean that your members also need clarity. In starting from scratch, I advise always starting with Who and Why before moving into How and What. But in some cases, the What (Programming) helps define the Who - see chapter 15.
User Contribution Journey and Lifecycle: place people as protagonists, not as the audience
I further developed the concepts presented in Chapter 17 (Closeness Circles) into more applicable frameworks: the User Contribution Journey and Lifecycle. The central ideas remain, quoting from the chapter above (in this book): "the more you grow, the more you make space for new roles within your community." The new frameworks help us with implementation within a team context:
User Contribution Journey: defines a clear path for people to grow within your community (through participation and contribution), from new to top contributors.
User Contribution Lifecycle: data-driven understanding of the time elapsed from the moment someone joins your community as a new member to when they become a top contributor, and finally to when they "retire" and open space for new top contributors.
These frameworks help you sustainably architect your community by defining 1) how members can actively contribute to delivering your core value proposition and 2) how long they will do that.
The contribution has to be defined by precise, measurable, achievable steps. Referencing Chapter 17 in this book: "It is your responsibility as a community builder to create communication systems that build and maintain trust while providing tools to empower people to help your community grow."
Moving forward
I plan to focus my next book on Community Architecture. I am featuring cases and stories from my own experience but also from community leaders I've been looking up to, mentoring, or advising. Community is an emerging field, and it is constantly evolving. I would love to stay in touch as we develop new understandings that better define the journey, the craft, and the role of community builders.
This note is a quick reminder that Hacking Communities is about developing yourself as a community leader. This book's last chapter: "My personal journey turned this book into a more spiritual than a practical guide to community building."
I wish you an incredible journey if you decide to read this book.
Lais de Oliveira
New York, November 22, 2022
Bonus Track: What They’re Saying
In case you want to hear other’s voices about Hacking Communities, I shared some reviews found across the internet (including some from the Amazon page):
FEATURED PODCASTS
Hacking Communities with Laís de Oliveira on Village Global's Venture Stories
Career Growth for Community Leaders with Laís de Oliveira on Portfolio Career Podcast
EP79: Hacking Communities w/ Lais de Oliveira on The Community Corner with Beth McIntyre
BOOK REVIEWS
“Laís is one of those rare people who lead their life by how they think the world should be, and in ways that can help the most people possible around them. This is what makes her the best type of community builder” – Excerpt from Foreword by Derek Andersen, Co-founder, and CEO at Startup Grind and Bevy
“It's both: practical and heartwarming. Besides rich personal experience told in a raw and authentic way, you can expect to find well-researched insights into community building… get ready for actionable know-how on how you can hack a community around your product, company or an idea.”
– Natasha Zolotareva, Journalist, International Media Specialist and Writer at Entrepreneur.com
“Most people who talk about community building want to romanticize it, or worse, they want to make it into a series of actionable “steps” without heart. Laís de Oliveira explains the required actions in amazing detail, but she does it with a sensitivity and a wisdom that can only come from experience (...) Every page gets better and better. If you care about people, read this book”
– Roy H. Williams, Author of the bestselling trilogy: Wizard of Ads
"Required reading for anyone looking to build communities. Part raw accounts from the journey of building communities -- from Malaysia to San Francisco -- part actionable guide for building communities; this book is a fantastic read. Highly recommended."
– Arnobio Morelix, Co-Founder & CEO at Sirius Education, Author of Rebooted: An Uncommon Guide to Radical Success and Fairness in the New World of Life, Death, and Tech
"An accessible and tactical guide to building community. As if Lais, in her work building up StartupGrind and other communities, wasn't enough of a reason to buy the book, her research-based approach to spark and scale communities is so clearly laid out in the book, within the first few pages I was already writing down notes of what I could be doing."
– Zvi Band, Entrepreneur and Author of Success Is in Your Sphere: Leverage the Power of Relationships to Achieve Your Business Goals
“The reason why it is possible using Oliveira’s strategy to hack a community is precisely because she doesn’t focus on strategies and tactics for building community. She wants to help you, the person building the community, grow into the mindset of being a community builder … This (book) is to understand how to build communities intrinsically. We’ve needed this in the space. It’s beautiful prose and it’s highly introspective. It’s tremendously artful and it deserves a read. It deserves two reads. Four reads. It deserves a lot of reads.”
– Samantha “Venia” Logan, Founder at Socially Constructed Online