One underrated factor in whether to engage in community-building[1] is how likely you are to move to a hub.
I suspect that in most cases people can achieve more when they are part of a group, rather than when they are by themselves. Let’s assume that your local community doesn’t already provide what you need. Let’s further assume that an online community isn’t sufficient for your needs either:
Then you have two main options:
• If there’s already a hub that provides the community that you need, then you could move there • You could try to build up the local community
There are a lot of advantages to the former. It can be quicker than trying to build up a community yourself and being in the hub will probably lead to you having more direct impact than you could have even if you managed to build up your local community quite a bit. So while either option could end up being more impactful, there’s a lot of reasons why it might make sense for people who are willing to move to just focus on figuring out how to set themselves up in a hub as soon as possible.
However, there are some people who are just not going to move to a hub, because they’re too rooted in their current location. My suspicion is that more of these people should be focusing on building up the community.
Since there are less opportunities outside of the hub, the opportunity cost is lower, but more importantly, someone who is planning to stay in the same location over the longer term is likely to capture more of the value from their own community-building efforts.
Obviously, this doesn’t apply to everyone and there are definitely people who can have far more impact through direct work, even whilst outside of a hub, than through community building. I would just like to see more people who are planning to stay put pick up this option.
To Community Build or Not
One underrated factor in whether to engage in community-building[1] is how likely you are to move to a hub.
I suspect that in most cases people can achieve more when they are part of a group, rather than when they are by themselves. Let’s assume that your local community doesn’t already provide what you need. Let’s further assume that an online community isn’t sufficient for your needs either:
Then you have two main options:
• If there’s already a hub that provides the community that you need, then you could move there
• You could try to build up the local community
There are a lot of advantages to the former. It can be quicker than trying to build up a community yourself and being in the hub will probably lead to you having more direct impact than you could have even if you managed to build up your local community quite a bit. So while either option could end up being more impactful, there’s a lot of reasons why it might make sense for people who are willing to move to just focus on figuring out how to set themselves up in a hub as soon as possible.
However, there are some people who are just not going to move to a hub, because they’re too rooted in their current location. My suspicion is that more of these people should be focusing on building up the community.
Since there are less opportunities outside of the hub, the opportunity cost is lower, but more importantly, someone who is planning to stay in the same location over the longer term is likely to capture more of the value from their own community-building efforts.
Obviously, this doesn’t apply to everyone and there are definitely people who can have far more impact through direct work, even whilst outside of a hub, than through community building. I would just like to see more people who are planning to stay put pick up this option.
Here I’m using community-building in a broad sense.