Indie Maker Community Ideas

Goals

  • Engage developer communities in building their projects, open-source projects and indie products, rather than passively listening.
  • Encourage people to Learn in Public and Build in Public.
  • Provide a safe space for people to fail, build, and be encouraged to try again.

Pains

  • Building products is a lonely journey with a lot of emotions.
    • Failing to gain traction, first users, or getting negative or no feedback can be very heartbreaking.
    • How might we support people who are on their journey to build their first indie products or projects?
    • S: reflection circles? weekly livestreams? Hack Nights at Garden Zero?
  • Many people failed to build products and MVPs, because of lack of know-how.
  • Hosting meetups, hack nights, hackathons and events has a lot of friction, so the community isn't very active.

Chun's Ideas chun-2.png

What can we do? / How to do it?

  • How to build an MVP series
    • A series of workshops for people who are new to building products, covering MVP hands-on.
    • Leading to communities for builders, similar to how the Fab Network was born out of series of classes.
    • Optional tracks for people who are interested in Web3, or other aspects of product.
    • Poom and Chun already tried this: How to build an MVP - Trial Class, Building MVPs for Developers -- the latest workshop was quite great.
  • Indie Makers Community
    • Start small with Chun, Poom, and a couple our friends who are building products in public.
    • Circles to share our learning every week.
    • Make it easy for people to join in and build along with us, similar to Buildspace.
    • See more ideas in the note ^
  • Hack Nights at Garden Zero
    • We can host "hack nights" for people to hack together.
    • We already built the Garden Gate authorizer that generates QR codes, so staffs can already invite people in.
  • Zero effort events with Garden Zero
    • In addition to Hack Nights, host occasional events that requires lower effort (Fridays?) and make it easy for other communities to join in.
    • Garden Zero

FigJam

How other communities does it?

  • Buildspace
    • Season 4's Nights and Weekends just done!
    • Used to only accept Web3 projects with Web3 courses, now it's open to every project.
    • Online-first, with offline gatherings later (Online + IRL)
    • Commitment guidelines of 10 hours/week
    • Very good livestreams and content produced
    • Final 32
  • Noisebridge Hackerspace
    • "creative technology community for excellent, do-ocratic, consensus-based collaboration"
    • hackerspace at SF, very good vibes
    • Has a great wiki of events and projects, uses Meetup.com for recurring events
  • Hack Club
    • middle-to-high-school students club for "teen hackers"
    • super cool vibe
    • provides a club system for students to open their own clubs (sortof-like chapters)
    • provides tools, directories and guidance for hackathon organizers and hackers
    • provides an open-source bank system, allowing clubs to request money from a central source
  • Clubhouse Network
    • Mitchel Resnick's extension of the computer clubhouse program
    • Clubhouse vibe is for students who is learning to code, explores the 4Ps of Creative Learning by building projects with friends

Poom's old notes.

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