🚀 The forum is live! Here's the current gameplan

[alexhillman]

Hey everyone!

Thanks for jumping in and being some of the first to try out this new forum. Before we get too far in, I wanted to share some thoughts and expectations.

First: at least for now, this is not a replacement for Slack.

There are definitely advantages to the “live chat” format that we don’t want to lose, but it also comes with some big disadvantages. In our case, the biggest problem is that valuable conversations are lost to Slack’s 10,000 message limit, and even then, reading through massive chat backlogs is clunky at best.

One of the things I really like is how Discourse lets us “store” Slack conversations in Discourse threads, like this one. This also means that valuable conversations can be curated into the Discussion Highlights category, and annotated over time.

We can also set up the Slack to automatically make a post when new topics are started in certain categories on Discourse. I’m going to keep this limited for now but see this as a nice way to close the loop between Slack and Discourse.

One challenge we will face is the question “where should I post - slack or discourse?” For now, I think it’s going to take some manual guidance to suggest “great stuff here in slack - can you post that to Discourse?” and over time, find a line. I think the best rule of thumb will be that if a conversation happens on Slack that would be helpful for others in the future, we should “archive” it into Discussion Highlights as well.

Second: the biggest reason that I wanted to launch this forum is to further develop our community of practice.

As the 30x500 student base grows, we’re seeing more and more people who are actively working to get better at the key skills they learn in 30x500. Mixed in with the progress updates is a valuable element of practice, and that’s something we really want to encourage.

That’s why the categories in the 30x500 students section are “Safari Practice Threads” and “Tips & Tricks”.

For Safari Practice Threads, I want to try an experiment where we offer fresh threads from across a variety of watering holes.

My plan is to add one new thread per week, on Mondays. These special threads titles will start with SAFARI ME.

If you are looking to brush up on your safari skills, you can use each thread just like we do in the in-course exercises.

1. Set a timer for 10 or 15 mins.
2. Do your best to pull out the pain/jargon/recommendations/worldview.
3. When you are done, share your actual Safari notes in the comments below the linked thread, and compare your notes to the notes shared by other people. See what you missed, and what you got that others didn’t.

Sound fun? Jump in there and give the first one a try!

Remember, that there isn’t a RIGHT set of answers, just your best understanding of what’s on the page. Got it?

Technical note about notification defaults

While bootstrapping this community, I’ve set all new users into “mailing list mode” which essentially means you will get an email for every new post and reply.

This probably isn’t ideal for everyone, but while this group is small and growing it’s my experience that this mode is helpful for making sure people get a sense of what’s happening.

Once we get to ~100 people on the forum (or maybe more/less, depending on activity levels), I’ll likely turn off mailing list mode by default.

In the mean time, if you’re especially picky about your email settings (or too overwhelmed to get every message), you can turn off mailing list mode in your personal email preferences here: https://community.stackingthebricks.com/u/YOURUSERNAME/preferences/emails

And candidly, I’m still learning my way around the other notification controls & digest defaults, so if anyone has non-confusing guides (aka anything but the official Discourse guides, which are masterfully obtuse) or recommendations of your own based on your participation in other communities, I’d love to see them!

Stuff for the near future

• Slowly adding/inviting more 30x500 students in batches.

• More categories based on areas of practice. Safari is a key starting point for obvious reasons, but I would like to create similar areas for ebombs, pitch writing, and maybe even (based on this thread) staying out of your own head

• Additional private groups. Right now, everyone is joining as part of the 30x500 student group (which is only visible to people inside the group). Down the road, we would like to experiment with private/focused sub-communities for people who’ve “unlocked” certain milestones.

• Longer term: semi-private and public areas for people putting our other products into action and over time a wider, public community of bootstrappers. But one thing at a time

With these guiding ideas, I’m excited to see where this forum takes us.

Questions? Ideas? Thoughts? Suggestions? Gifs to show your support and enthusiasm? Post 'em below!

[samir (Samir Abid)]

Sounds good @alexhillman

I like the idea of keeping the history of decent thread conversations - it is hard to keep up on Slack (even though I check it everyday).

The links on Safari practise are not working for me - access denied.

I’d like to see the next step too - so what eBombs (titles) from these Safari notes.

I’d really like the opportunity to submit my Safari notes and get other peoples ideas on what to write about. Personally I struggle with “not seeing wood for trees” or “that too simple, everyone knows that” when trying to choose which eBomb to tackle next.

[alexhillman]

Whoops, fixed the Safari practice links. They should work now!

I’m thinking the same way re: turning Safari threads into ebombs…bullet point pitches too!

I like the idea of having a way to get feedback on your Safari own real notes and ebombs BUT I don’t think it’s a good idea to get other people to do the work for you of converting safari into ebomb concepts. That’s your job

I understand the challenge you describe though, so I’ll think about exercises we can come up with to give you more practice though.

[jon (Jon Hilton)]

+1 for ways to help with generating ebomb ideas from safari. For some reason I struggle with this.

I note note from time to time peeps over on the slack channel who seem to have come up with a huge backlog of ideas from their research and the thing is, I think I know how to approach this, maybe it is just a question of practice/more deliberate effort!