Rosie Sherry and Simon Tomes catch up on a big week for the MoTaverse, starting with the newly refreshed community profile pages and what went into designing them to feel more personal and familiar. They talk through how their roles as community builders keep shifting, from product focused work on profiles to gearing up for their annual conference, MoTaCon, and the decision to bundle conference access into membership, riding the wave of whatever the business needs at the time.
They reflect on what it takes to inspire members to take a leap and trust a new way of doing things, then dig into systems thinking and Adlerian psychology, exploring what self acceptance, confidence in others, and contribution to others mean for community feeling.
The conversation moves into the overlap between journalism and community listening, before turning to how the team has built up its professional writing skills and how they're using shared writing, Claude skills, and cohorts to help more members write with confidence. They wrap up with plans for dedicated creation hour events and swag incentives for micro moments to get more people making Moments on the MoTaverse.
Chapter timestamps
00:42 New MoTaverse Profile Refresh
06:35 Shifting Roles and Responsibilities
09:50 Focusing On MoTaCon Planning
14:25 Bundling Membership and Conferences
21:49 Inspiring Community Members To Leap
27:32 Systems Thinking In Communities
30:51 Adlerian Psychology and Community
38:12 Journalism and Community Listening
43:10 Building Professional Writing Skills
52:55 Empowering Community Through Shared Writing
54:18 Building Writer Cohorts and Challenges
55:32 Creating Dedicated Creation Hour Events
57:03 Swag Incentives for Micro Moments
58:24 Session Wrap Up and Outro
Handy links
- This is Strategy — A book by Seth Godin on systems thinking and strategy, which Simon and Rosie were reading and credited with shaping how they think about change within existing systems.
- The Courage to be Disliked — A book by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga exploring Adlerian psychology, which Simon just finished and connected directly to community feeling.
- How six tiny newsrooms are building trust through community listening — An article Rosie had read recently, linking community-centred journalism practices to community building.
- Bylines Network — A network of citizen-journalism local newspapers across the UK founded by Mike Galsworthy, flagged as a potential future guest to discuss community and journalism.
- Rosieland — Rosie's own community-research newsletter and site, flagged for listeners as worth checking out, including her work building a company database.
- Things to write about in the MoTaverse – a collection of Moments to spark writing ideas
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