At the Town Hall on June 8th it seemed like there was a common feeling that the systems currently in use to run Edge City (Social Layer, Telegram, Notion, Substack) are suboptimal for the real needs of the org and community. I want to see if we can figure out how to do better without reinventing the wheel, embarking on a years-long dev effort, or spending tons of money. There have been various efforts to try to solve this and I’ll try to have a good understanding of what was tried before as we go into this discussion.

This initial hour-long session will just be focused on understanding major pain/friction points with the current systems, and outlining the overall functions those systems provide, as well as any additional functions or features that might be desired (e.g. shared profiles between systems). I also hope to be able to go over what the team has already tried (e.g. WhatsApp, Signal, etc.) as alternatives to-date. If there is time we can throw out any alternative systems that seem promising based on what we’ve learned. But my main goal is that we end with a good understanding of the problems and the vision for something better so we can each go research, test, and think about how best to bring that about. A possible future meeting could then go over proposed solutions.

Note: you do not need to be a coder to contribute to this, in fact I hope the eventual solutions/systems to require a minimum of customization. If you’ve felt friction in using the systems at Edge City this year and want to share your experience, or have ideas for other improvements, additional features/systems, etc., please come and share!

For now the place and time are slightly tentative, but I’m hopeful this is a good slot that doesn’t interfere with too much else that is going on.

Open-edit conceptual diagram if you want to see an outline of what I’m thinking about: https://www.figma.com/board/nxu8ifZnHJtRxkzgtrAPQL/Edge-City-Social-Tech?t=mZ63EGzV8kviQIla-1