Right now we’ve got a couple of dozen active people in our Telegram chat, but many more makers seem interested in joining us. I don’t think having one group will scale though, so I’m thinking of different ways to address this. One idea I’m currently thinking about is to somewhat decentralise WIP.
The idea would be to keep our group as we have now, but make @wipbot available to other groups as well. So for example a group of friends could invite @wipbot and start sharing their todo’s. Maybe we’d build a Slack bot for teams, etc. There would be many different ways to share your todo’s and mark them as done.
All the todo’s, products, and maker profiles would still be centralised on wip.chat though. So you could check out what somebody is working on, even if you aren’t part of the same group. To deal with the increased volume of activity you could “follow” specific people, or “filter” by group.
Cons:
A big part of WIP’s appeal is the community. So for people that aren’t part of an existing community yet, this won’t solve much.
The other groups don’t necessarily share the same values as our current group. For example, what happens to wip.chat if someone starts a group for internet scammers? Will we start seeing scammy products, etc?
Not sure how to test this idea. Feels shitty to later remove wipbot access from other groups if we decide it’s not working.
Pros:
Opens up a lot of possibilities
Allows overall community to quickly scale (which means more active Q&A, etc)
Some makers currently don’t use WIP because our group is too active for them. This would alleviate that concern. (There's some really cool makers we're missing out on. Would be cool to have them on wip.chat!)
We could easily start spin off groups if the main one becomes too big
Any group could have their own policy of who’s allowed in (e.g. > $1,000 MRR, etc)
It would stimulate for a more diverse overall community
We could add ways for the different groups to interact through wipbot. Maybe there would be a group with a lot of designers. So if a developer has a design question, wipbot could ping the designer group. Etc.
What do you think? I’m interested in what you think personally as a member of the group, but please also imagine what it would be like if you weren’t part of the group yet.
If you’re part of similar groups, please float the idea with them and let us know if they’d be interested. If you’re part of a team, I’d also be interested if it’s something you’d consider using. And whether you’d be okay with all the tasks being public.
As I mentioned I’m unsure what the best approach to testing this idea would be. Maybe we could try it out with a few select groups first before opening it up to everyone.
Curious to hear your thoughts!
P.S.
When I say decentralised I don't mean blockchain or any of that stuff. Don't think it has added value here and would just unnecessarily complicate development.
Right now we’ve got a couple of dozen active people in our Telegram chat, but many more makers seem interested in joining us. I don’t think having one group will scale though, so I’m thinking of different ways to address this. One idea I’m currently thinking about is to somewhat decentralise WIP.
The idea would be to keep our group as we have now, but make @wipbot available to other groups as well. So for example a group of friends could invite @wipbot and start sharing their todo’s. Maybe we’d build a Slack bot for teams, etc. There would be many different ways to share your todo’s and mark them as done.
All the todo’s, products, and maker profiles would still be centralised on wip.chat though. So you could check out what somebody is working on, even if you aren’t part of the same group. To deal with the increased volume of activity you could “follow” specific people, or “filter” by group.
Cons:
Pros:
What do you think? I’m interested in what you think personally as a member of the group, but please also imagine what it would be like if you weren’t part of the group yet.
If you’re part of similar groups, please float the idea with them and let us know if they’d be interested. If you’re part of a team, I’d also be interested if it’s something you’d consider using. And whether you’d be okay with all the tasks being public.
As I mentioned I’m unsure what the best approach to testing this idea would be. Maybe we could try it out with a few select groups first before opening it up to everyone.
Curious to hear your thoughts!
P.S.
When I say decentralised I don't mean blockchain or any of that stuff. Don't think it has added value here and would just unnecessarily complicate development.