Rosaie Sherry and Saimon Tomes open this episode of This Week in Community with hitting Claude usage limits, a “no more spreadsheets” approach, voice editing documents and spinning up internal apps. They reflect on staying visible in the community while heads down on projects, on managing work through conversation rather than to-do lists, and on what AI means for community knowledge management. Simon contrasts human in the loop checking with quality in the loop thinking, and shares how personal AI experiments spark ideas for letting members customise their own experience.
The conversation turns to member data, from matching people (should job hunting work more like dating?) to the case for building data over features. They discuss showing your workings to build trust and the long game members play to get value from community. Then come the contradictions: bad bots scraping websites, Meta’s business terms, Spotify’s AI remix plans and artist rights, and the environmental impact of data centres, now being rebranded as compute campuses. They close by noting how opposition to data centres is uniting otherwise divided communities, and what community builders might learn from that.
Chapter timestamps
00:00 AI Efficiencies and Workflow Changes
05:32 Voice Editing and Internal Apps
08:57 Maintaining Human Community Presence
10:17 Human-Centric AI Project Management
12:55 AI-Driven Community Knowledge Management
14:34 Human In versus Quality In Loop
16:52 Personal Productivity and Data Customisation
19:56 Member Data and Custom Experiences
22:39 Strategic Member Matching via Data
26:11 Prioritising Data Over Features
29:22 Building Trust Through Transparency
35:42 Risks of Bad Bots and Scraping
41:54 AI Content Rights and Artist Terms
46:03 Environmental Impact of Data Centres
50:24 Community Unification Against Infrastructure
Handy links
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