Creating new layers of care for Professional Membership

TLDR; We’re creating a layer of care to enable us to smoothly run the MoTaverse, this means participation requires a Professional Membership.

Let’s face it. Change is a constant, right now it just so happens to be happening faster. And that creates interesting situations. There isn’t a career path that isn’t being impacted with the forces of change. Whether it be economic, of what comes with the likes of AI.

We’re here for it. Change also happens faster when we’re trying to be audacious. As a team we’re embracing building big things. Exploring creative boundaries. Absolutely loving serving quality and tech people.

I won’t go into the boring details of how, yet for quite a while now we’ve been targeted with spam profile creation. It’s something that people don’t tend to see, but in the background, we manually review all accounts and delete those that are not deserving of our quality space. What’s more, we’ve exposed ourselves a bit more with the addition of memes, memories, and job postings as free content. These now require a layer of protection as some users try to abuse them.

Annoying, yes, but as the saying goes, it’s a good problem to have. It’s also an opportunity for us to be creative and think differently about what we are creating. This includes the work we feel happy to do as a team.

MoT Profiles are genuinely useful, especially when it comes to helping your work stand out instead of getting lost in the busyness of the internet. They can also be a great addition to your CV. Employers love them! Other members can easily recommend you too.

I like to call MoT Profiles an essential part of an MEO strategy (instead of SEO), it’s a MoTaverse Engine Optimisation strategy. Yes, it’s a bit of fun and tongue in cheek, but it’s also a serious mission of ours to uplift our members in many ways. Many MoT members also appear on the first page of Google search results and in AI (GEO and AEO) results. This does not happen by accident.

This is part of what we call Community-as-a-Service. (Learn a bit more on it here, here or here!) We will get better at explaining this over time, but for now, we see what we offer as part of membership as a service. We’re not here just for a laugh, or a chit-chat. You can get literally everything you need to expand your career. Events, conferences, informal and formal learning, opportunities to participate, and organising of events.

How is this different from other traditional offerings? By bundling it up, it simply works 100x better. One click access to all the things. No need to get budget for each thing individually, plus all the data is interconnected. It’s simply beautiful.

To save me from writing an essay, the short story is that all the recent features we’ve been adding are now restricted to Professional Membership. This is recognition that our capacity is limited, our to-do list only seems to get longer, and we need to ensure we serve our paying customers.

This is all still with the goal of building the most amazing tech community out there. We don’t want to build what already exists. We’re exploring new territory. We’ve made so much progress already, and we’re so excited to keep going, with layers of care.

In practical terms, this means things like the following will require a Professional Membership:

Posting a job
Adding a Meme
Submitting a talk
Writing an article
Adding a Memory
Running a Chapter
Adding glossary terms
Doing an online Masterclass
Contributing Call for Insights
Maintaining a company page
Adding links to the Observatory
Submitting proposals to contribute

The Club remains free to use, as do attending events like TWiQ and Chapters. Articles and various types of content will continue to be open. The majority of other content remains for Professional Members only.

What do we mean by a layer of care?

Care is in our roots. Community is care. Quality is care.

Everything we do is because we care about the future of the quality industry and we are continually investing in it.

Boundaries are healthy. Our layer of care are boundaries we co-create to enable us to serve you better. We know quality is not about more, it is about better. Sometimes better requires us to focus and serve our quality people as best as we can.

A layer of care means we:

are human-led
make quality matter, with you
consider ethics core to our existence
invest in being as clear and open as possible
focus on your needs and build a better user experience
protect co-created quality learning material from bots and spam
serve more members with more depth and in more meaningful ways
listen to voices that matter and support professionals serious about their career growth
aim for sustainability as a company so we can keep serving the community for the long term
easily spot opportunities to amplify people, encourage participation, and simplify ways to participate
engage in conversational research to understand what truly matters, turning curiosity into powerful learning material