I helped co-host a popup village in rural South Korea last week. Mix of co-working, co-living and local activities like trail running and bird watching.
Post-event feedback showed everyone loved it. But personally I think we could have done better organizing on the co-working side so people has a more predictable schedule to lock-in.
So I’m planning what the next iteration of this event could look like if the co-working aspect was stronger. Especially in the area of everyone sharing their personal and/or professional intentions with each other. So they're more likely to accomplish those intentions with the help of other participants.
Sad to look back years ago when the first mobile apps started adopting this "Remind Me Later"-only dark pattern and is now festering everyday drivers like your OS.
Between these and services that suddenly suffer from amnesia and spamming me with marketing notifications and emails after months or years of silence, it’s becoming more tiring to use any service that grows significantly enough where they don’t need to care about what their users actually want.
One of the reasons "aged" account marketplaces got more popular. People buy from vendors that farm a ton of these accounts and wait to sell them, or those reselling compromised accounts (especially with EDU accounts before institutions actually implemented security controls).
This is the issue I've seen in new communities. Although my framing is from seeing mixed digital nomad and local communities. But ones that have the ambition to start a tribe or even a hub, if we’re going by Vitalik's terminology.
If you allow in more “non-believers”, just anyone that can join a group chat and physically go to a Google Map pin, more often that not most people will be non-participatory after their first contact. This makes it harder for a core team to get things off the ground if they have bigger ambitions than just a weekly meetup.
I think the crypto community took that to heart in particular due to DAOs having very few successful examples, and many of these new crypto-adjacent societies are using a different model that’s more similar to building a startup.
Last week I spun up a HN clone for digital nomad news.
Since I was researching DNS and global mobility, and wanted to share links with others, figured I'd just spin up a link site (though I'm still the only user).
One unique difference is I have a field for English Title, since I consume a lot of Korean & Japanese articles and want to share these, but don't want to have people translate the titles before they understand why they should read them.
Still working on my digital nomad event and workation aggregator.
But now with travel and visa guides to help remote workers become productive in Japan and South Korea ASAP and give them visa guidance if they want to stay a bit longer.
Started working on digital nomad event and workation aggregator two months ago. https://reorient.guide/
That main usecase is done. I’m now focusing on travel guides for remote workers. Goal is to help those new to a country to become as productive as they would be at home within 2-3 hours upon landing at the airport. I completed 80% of a guide to South Korea.
I started working on these guides after my friends in Tokyo commented during our last co-working session on how fast I got to our favourite spot (Tokyo Innovation Base) from Narita Airport; they thought I was already in-town.
I think we’ve done a great job of convincing each other within our tech bubble than everyone wants a SPA. Not sure the general public cares for our enthusiasm though.
Post-event feedback showed everyone loved it. But personally I think we could have done better organizing on the co-working side so people has a more predictable schedule to lock-in.
So I’m planning what the next iteration of this event could look like if the co-working aspect was stronger. Especially in the area of everyone sharing their personal and/or professional intentions with each other. So they're more likely to accomplish those intentions with the help of other participants.
https://protoville.xyz