Thinking About How We Learn Together

The web offers so many ways to learn on your own: you can walk down the street with a podcast streaming in your ears, or read a book, or work through tutorials. And yet, there’s something really inspiring about adding a conversation to the material to shake up your worldview, see something in a different light, and fine tune your opinion.

Our 24-hour community chat was inspired by 24-hour online book clubs that bring folks together to discuss the same resource — unpack a book or article and think through complex issues and preconceived notions from diverse viewpoints. It was also fueled by our belief that, like a book club or study group, the web can provide a sense of belonging that isn’t exclusive.

A couple of weeks ago, we launched the very first community chat, on income volatility. Our community had incredibly powerful conversations with just a handful of people. Using synchronous (live) chat, we saw participants broaden their worldviews about poverty and systemic inequity. Community means connection, and our community chat helped make that happen.

Recipe for a Community Chat

As community designers, we understand that income volatility is a complicated, emotional issue, and we aimed to have a productive conversation. Here’s how we designed the flow of the experience to be sensitive to the tensions at play and to nurture thoughtfulness.

Recognize topics that are relevant. Two recent articles resonated with our community on Twitter: the first was a piece in The Guardian that highlighted how a payday loan could result in 1900% interest, and the other was a recent New York Times Magazine story on our friends over at Even who address income volatility by “smoothing out” inconsistent paychecks.

Think through the context. Eva + I understood that synchronous chat might be new for a lot of people, and we wanted to be as welcoming as possible. Knowing that Slack has some jargon (channels, mentions, emoji) we made a video tutorial where we walked through how to join, participate, and even express your individuality through emoji.

Eva and Vanessa produced a playful walkthrough of Slack for the Stellar Community.

Making an interactive experience means modeling the kind of experience you’d like others to have. Every bit of contextual info counts, and a playful nudge to get started can go a long way.

@eva: for sure! you’ve got some cool processes around community on-boarding, slack is a great platform for community management as long as there’s someone to prod and ask questions (such as yourself!). — @kapziel

Frame the activity. Along with our narrative UX lead, Jessica, we mapped out each of our Slack channels to be clear and have a distinct purpose. Since learning usually involves sharing, we decided to hold the community chat in our #resources channel. Additionally, we came up with a series of questions to discuss over the course of the day.

We designed our Slack channel to have clear, context-rich descriptions.

Distribute the expertise. We asked Even cofounder Quentin Farmer to join us to get the conversation started around their design framework, lessons learned, and the different use cases around income volatility.

Successes!

Through interacting with Quentin and each other, we refined our thinking about how income volatility directly impacts poverty.

I believe that financial education, particularly in secondary school, can do a lot to help people avoid traps like credit card debt, payday loans, etc. Poverty is unfortunately self reinforcing, because it’s hard to gather together enough money to pull yourself out of a situation like that. — @chrishall78 My hope is that education, and using a set of operating processes (“Send the contract to the client, get it signed, wait for deposit, start work once deposit received, etc.) can eliminate most of the cashflow issues that freelancers face. A huge issue for freelancers is a lack of structure in how they operate. — @alexsingh

In the context of live chat, we could push each other to reflect, especially about power and assumptions around money.

I think almost everyone acknowledges that the nature of employment (and the bargain that exists between employees, employers, and public institutions) is changing and a lot of silicon valley energy is spent on accelerating that change. on balance, I actually think this has the potential to be a really good thing but few people (so far) are being thoughtful about building the frameworks that will let people thrive in this new environment. — @qf

Our Slack channel was abuzz: 37 new members joined us that day, meaning that we grew by 13.5%. A few folks were actively looking to integrate with Stellar and were pleased to find others who were already doing so.

In reflecting on the event, we loved the pulse of being together in the same room with everyone else, digesting the different ideas and links. Sharing a common purpose for a day brought us together in a meaningful way — it felt like more than water-cooler chatter.

We’re Doing It Again!

Our community is passionate about helping others understand the basics of digital currency. From remittances, financial education, and mobile money to the freelance economy, our crew is eager to use digital currency and open networks to improve livelihoods.

Our next community chat will focus on learning: What is one thing that you wish people understood about digital currency?

We’ll gather in the #general channel for discussion on June 17 at 1pm EST / 10am PST and again at 8pm EST / 5pm PST to share our questions. Bring a link to your favorite blog post, youtube tutorial, or article. We’d love to see you there.

Resources and Further Reading

Written by Vanessa, with editing help and inspiration from Eva Gantz, Jessica Collier, and Quinten Farmer.