New Project: The Workshop Discord Server

Some of you might have heard about this new project I’m working on from social media posts, and I thought I’d give people more details of the project in this post.





Introduction

I’m Hobby, I’m a Canadian pen spinner from UPSB (Universal Pen Spinning Board). I moderated the forum for a time before it was shut down. On UPSB, I’ve taken on many projects: from organizing a pen spinning podcast to making a collaboration video series for each season of a year. Because of my focus and prior experience on a lot of community based projects, I decided to start a project called, “The Workshop”.





My Objective

“To create a constantly growing English-speaking pen spinning community on a Discord server to help newcomers or veterans learn and improve with a friendly, helpful, and safe environment.”





Why a new Discord server?



Well, Discord is becoming a great way to organize a community in an old-school chatroom format. The fact that UPSB is down means that there isn’t a proper learning environment for the English-speaking community anymore. Currently, there are other pen spinning Discord servers, but they don’t really have the safe learning environment I want for the community to grow. What the other Discord servers have going for them is although they lack the learning environment, it’s a great place for people of that age group to hang out. So, I feel like there’s a market for both types of Discord communities.





Brief Overview/Work Progress

I started working on this project sometime in late November or early December of 2018, and I’m pretty close to finally releasing this to the public. I really wanted to make sure I didn’t rush this and take my time for the sake of the project and my own mental health, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to keep it up if I got burnt out.

This is a very brief overview of the work I’ve done so far:

Writing the Discord rules

Recruiting a staff team with their age and maturity in mind



Learning and setting up a Discord server from scratch

Writing a moderator’s guide to show my intent on the server

Writing bio’s of the staff team

Hiatus from working during winter break



Finishing bio’s



Private invites sent to start the discord off



Currently, in the advertising step





Staff Team

Now, I definitely cannot take on possibly the biggest community project I’ve ever worked on without some help, and I definitely needed it. I chose moderators and helpers based on their age, maturity, knowledge, and social skills. I wanted a staff team that was 20+ age wise to add a general level of maturity to the server. My staff team has helped me quite a bit so far with decisions and ideas.

This is the list of people helping me run “The Workshop” so far:



Hobby (myself)



ᴁva



Coffeelucky

DArKT

Chevy

Tiffany

SpeakEZ

i.suk

Baaron

Gunter (Temporary helper for updates on the new server icon)

If you would like to know more about the background of the staff members on the list, check out this link for their bio’s: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-aYNVeLwDmOQFaBCT47t02JeeMndcnpt_vQeWAS859Y/edit?usp=sharing





Invite links

The invite links of the new Discord server will be posted on my Twitter (@HobbyLogics), some Discord servers, and other social media platforms in the next several weeks. Hope to see you there!





More Information

Discord Rules

Staff Bio’s