Isn't it great: community builders are educators and in-person events are back

Rosie Sherry and Simon Tomes open this week's This Week in Community with a run of bird analogies, from seagull management to parachute journalism, exploring what it means to swoop in and support a community without disappearing for long stretches, and how MoT's own chapter structure offers a more consistent alternative. 

They touch on the intensity of conference season, with MoTaCon looming, before welcoming Claudia Cafeo, senior community specialist at Zapier, who mentions her own ZapConnect coming up and explains why she now leads with mental frameworks rather than generic AI talk, helping her Discord community navigate organisational change and pressure to adopt new tools. Claudia shares why her background in education shapes her belief that community builders are, at heart, educators, while being honest about the limits of one to one support and the importance of boundaries.

Andy Claremont joins the conversation to reflect on measurement and context. The group digs into event accessibility, persistent back channels for members who can't attend in person, with Andy Piper weighing in on the return of in person events. They discuss what draws people to events and how to facilitate real human connection.

Rosie closes out by sharing her move away from LinkedIn, building Rambles on Rosieland, and why she's drawn to transparent algorithms and independent content, in contrast to the manipulation she feels has taken over mainstream social platforms.

Chapter timestamps

00:03 Seagull Management and Parachute Journalism
04:19 The Role of Community Chapters
07:37 Community Energy and Conference Season
09:17 Mental Frameworks Over Generic AI
11:24 Navigating Organisational Change and Pressure
13:58 Scaling Community Through Practical Workflows
15:23 Community Builders as Educators
19:20 Managing Boundaries and Empathy at Scale
25:39 The Importance of Measurement and Context
29:18 Event Accessibility and Persistent Channels
39:57 The Convergence of Events and Membership
45:36 Facilitating Human Connection at Events
51:09 Building Micro-Posting on Rosie Land
52:44 Designing Transparent Community Algorithms
55:06 Creating Independent Content Ecosystems
57:01 The Manipulation of Algorithm Behaviour
58:47 Loss of Connection in Social Platforms

Handy links

• Claudia Cafeo on LinkedIn
• Andy Claremont on LinkedIn
• ZapConnect – Zapier's annual conference
• Pangram — An AI content detector Rosie mentioned signing up to, which she uses to gauge how much LinkedIn content is AI-generated.
• "Meetup.com is so over" by Andy Piper — A blog post Andy flagged in the chat about Meetup's decline following its acquisition by Bending Spoons.
• Rosieland — Rosie's own platform where she now shares short "Rambles" (her alternative to posting on LinkedIn/Twitter) alongside longer writing and a glossary.
• Digital parachute journalism definition — Rosie referenced a definition from the Rosieland glossary.