From Twitch Channels to Pasifika Tech Networks: Going Deep to Serve a Specific Audience.

Lessons Learned Along the Way to Building Pasifika Online Communities.

‘scuse the staunch image of “Polynesian students” that doesn’t have much to do with the newsletter… I just thought it was a bad-ass pic.

---

Talofa reader,

This week, I have been thinking about communities, specifically online communities, and the concept of "community building." I had never heard of this term until 2017 when I heard it on the Indie Hackers Podcast. They used the term to describe a group of people who would engage and congregate around a product. They talked about it as a type of growth "hack" or other product-growing exercise.

Initially, this seemed strange to me, as it made sense in terms of manipulating and using human behavior to your advantage, i.e., for profit. However, I understood what they were trying to do. I found it peculiar that it included the word "community" and treated it as something that you actively worked on (which I read as "manipulated," because I'm jaded, lol).

To me, community was always something that just "was." They were naturally occurring things in the wild and usually formed around shared culture, a sport, or a common interest. This was obviously naive of me because "community" is something that takes deliberate work and effort to build, grow, and maintain.

Now that I'm building a couple of communities with my charity team and a few helping hands, I have learned a few things, about myself mostly, but also a lot about what it takes to do this work of building communities (especially online) in the community.

These are some of the things I have learned...

Online is Hard

I think building an online community is a special type of "hard." While in-real-life communities also have their challenges, the reality of online communication being sort-of-not-really-there, but there-you-are (muted? no video?) makes it uniquely difficult.

Reflecting on my initial belief that communities just existed and worked out naturally, I should have known this would be my first lesson learned in building an online community.

The pandemic made us painfully aware of how difficult it is to achieve the same team cohesion and "bond" through Google Meet or Zoom meetings without in-person interactions. It is even harder for distributed teams, as your team members may live in different countries or even hemispheres when I worked at Salesforce. I’m as much of an anti-social computer hermit as the next geek, and even I understand the importance of meeting people face-to-face as an essential and healthy activity for human beings.

Because we lack the intangible in-person energy and vibe, and all the unspoken and unconscious cues we humans signal across the office, the screen and online connection feels the way it does, lacking context and subtext. That's why we need to be explicit in our actions and communication online and be more forthright in order to bridge that techno-gap, that cyber limbo that exists between the person on your screen (face, username, email text) and you.

Engagement Is No Accident

When people talk about "increasing engagement" in their communities, I often see a disconnect between that "want" and the real-world effort required to achieve that goal. Someone has to do that work.

The saying "it takes a village…" to raise a child also applies to building a community, whether it's online or in real life. Because it does take a whole village to make the thing successful.

I remember when I started a Twitch channel, I wanted to achieve affiliated status, which required having a certain number of followers and viewership. To learn from others, I subscribed to several streamers across a few genres, and I watched what they did to grow their community. What I saw was a lot of consistent, deliberate effort by streamers to engage their audiences and make their stream and platforms fun and engaging for everyone who was part of it.

And they were successful.

It didn't happen overnight, but they got the community they worked for. Obviously, doing something you love, such as playing games, hacking, or watching YouTube on stream, makes the journey a little bit more bearable, but a lot of hard work and consistency balanced that out plenty, as I saw and read in articles about folks making streaming their main job.

Minimum Viable Audience

This is a term by Seth Godin, and he defines it as:

“…the smallest market you can imagine. The smallest market that can sustain you, the smallest market you can adequately serve.”

What he's talking about is identifying and serving a specific audience to the best of your ability. Not going wide, but going deep.

What does this have to do with what I'm learning building a community?

There's a reason the "Pasifika Tech Network" community is for Pasifika who work in, or want to get into, the technology industry. It's because that's the smallest audience that I can serve to the best of my abilities. In the past, I tried to cover a broad range of "helping Pasifika" as my audience, building websites, online platforms, and school IT systems. There was no way I could have continued doing that long-term. But I decided to get more specific, to serve a niche (and "niche" is an understatement, lol), and I've found that with my current community projects. Both projects aren't trying to scale to 100, they're not trying to mass-produce anything. They're both trying to provide a specific service of a specific quality to a specific audience of Pasifika who are in, or want to get into, tech.

Conclusion

Some last minute thoughts as I close this off at 3am on a Wednesday morning..

1. For the record - and I say this plenty to folks I know and work alongside in the community who do actual community work as their career - I'm not that charitable or as community-minded as my portfolio might suggest. I'm no saint. I'm just someone who wants to make my mum proud, and I want my people to win. If I can help make that happen, I'm here for it.

2. No one is entitled to a thriving community or people's engagement. You have to work for it, and that's it - no guarantees. I think if you can reconcile that, you'll be okay with this grind.

3. I'm no expert. I don't have a degree in sociology, and I don't know what the best HR practices are for producing the best communities. These are just my observations.

I really need to sort out my schedule to post this out on time.

Thanks for reading. I'll see you in the next episode.

Learning

Things I’m actively studying or learning this week…

• Studying for the ‘AWS Certified Security - Speciality’ certificate - going slowly - but it’s going: Security Groups.

Building

Things I’m building or working on this week…

• Setup my Proxmox lab for some K8s refresher and infrastructure work.

• Revisited my AWS YouTube Analyzing project to progress it a bit more with Step Functions.

• S3 Archive Solution with Lifecycle Policies, using CDK and golang - Random project cos I wanted to learn more CDK.

Interesting Reads

Articles or other writing that stood out to me this week…

• “How Do I make my sure my work is visible?” - definitely a working in Big Tech dilemma, a lot of talent and great work flying around, how do you compete in that space?

Community

Other projects in community I’m working on…

• Pasifika Tech Education Charity - Providing Tech Learning Opportunities for the Pasifika Community.

• Pasifika Tech Network - A Network for Pasifika Tech Professionals & Learners.