Just like last year, the students spent our penultimate class of the semester in pairs, analyzing the root causes of a failure they experienced. These are the themes that emerged from the resulting conversations:
1. Maintaining Motivation
There are two potential explanations for why this became the semester’s biggest struggle: 1) everyone worked solo and didn’t have partners, and 2) Project 2 came with fewer visible constraints and deadlines (as opposed to the $1000 project).
As a result, the students struggled with the lack of external accountability, figuring out whether their projects were working, and simply continuing to be excited about their projects even when they hit a rough patch. Additionally, a few people really struggled with when and whether to give up on their ideas to try something new.
The students who successfully navigated this were those who routinely got outside feedback or had some other measure of external accountability, but this is definitely a tough problem. Our best recommendation is to find an accountability buddy or advisor who you can approach for sanity checks and an honest second opinion when you really get lost in your own head.
2. Spreading the Word
Unsurprisingly for a project that’s entirely about communities, figuring out how to spread the word and recruit members was a common stumbling block for the students.
The students found asking for help and promoting their own projects immensely uncomfortable, especially since many of them consider themselves shy people. It can be awkward to reach out to friends, and even more awkward to realize that your friends aren’t necessarily the right audience for your project.
Participating in small communities is a far cry from having to build one, and figuring out how to make something grow organically with no seed network proved very difficult for most of the students. A great outcome of this, though, is a greater appreciation for the work of community managers. Emotional labor is really hard!
3. Perfectionism
Last year’s champion struggle surfaces again in a slightly different form. Perfectionism in community building feels like “waiting for something to click”, “trying to attract only the people you’re comfortable with”, or “fear of losing control of the community if it grows too fast”. Many of the students also struggled with inviting people into their experiments when they didn’t feel like they had a concrete plan. This, too, is something that doesn’t get better except through experience. (And maybe an appreciation of wild communities?)
4. New Tools
Community building involves a very different set of tools—social media, event registration sites, mailing lists, blogs, chat rooms—from the ones the students are used to using or even thinking of as tools. Some of the students were overly-reliant on a single platform, and felt the pain of arbitrary constraints and rules on their fledgling communities. Others started carving out community spaces through posting content, only to quickly realize how difficult and time-consuming executing a good content strategy can be.
On the positive side, a few students figured out some of the abstract “tools” behind running events by attending other meetups.
5. Scoping
A close cousin to perfectionism and last year’s challenge of prioritization, scoping caused a lot of problems this time around. Some bit off more than they could chew and failed to execute certain parts of their projects due to schedule limitations. Others failed to leave room for multiple iterations. The difficulty of scoping appropriately extended to the target audience for the projects as well: branding for too narrow of an audience can limit how the project can evolve, but not picking a specific enough group leaves too much room for confusion.
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As an instructor, I’m really pleased that the themes that emerged this time around were so different from last year’s. For us, it’s great food for thought for how we’ll be shaping the design for the class next year. For the students, we we hope that surfacing some of these early on in their careers and before their thesis projects will help them anticipate, plan for, and ultimately address them more effectively.
