Published on 2025-03-29 09:37 by Kevin Coyle

Building a Community Online

I’ve been interested in how communities are formed online as I’ve been doing these courses for OMSCS at Georgia Tech. I’m in a slack channel for Data Scientists that is about 8 years running, and back in the day, I was pretty active on AIM and chatrooms.

How do these self-organizing communities come together? There’s usually a person who is silently making the group project work right? What about those communities that blur the interaction between online and in real life (IRL) like Pokemon Go?

These are big important questions… best left to boring Russian novelists and teenagers on acid. I just want to build a funny site where people can learn good.

Headless Communities

Related to all of this and my thoughts about how generally I have come to the realization that I don’t fully understand what’s going on (see post on Sileninja and screenshot below)… I think it would be cool if this “brand” functioned as headless. I’ve been interested in this notion of community driven brands more on headless brands here and here.

Meme Driven Development

It started as a meme. There was a tweet that went viral during Covid (none of those words are in the bible). It was shared in our college friends group chat

Flash forward a few years, we would joke about Guy Scouts and badges. It wasn’t anything serious, just “that would be a funny badge” or awarding each other for doing stuff. Nothing serious. We had also joked that it would be neat if there was an online experience where someone could earn badges for completing courses/tasks.

Then one night I drunkenly bought a few domains. I decided on Dude Scouts because, being from California, dude is both cooler and gender neutral. Plus it probably puts us further away from trademark infringement? Maybe, maybe not.

Anywho, flash foward and I decided that this is the year we take it out of the group chat. Naturally, I txted the group chat:

Okay and now, almost 4 months after that text exchange, I start to code this thing. I don’t really have a vision for it, and I don’t really even know what I’m doing from a technical side. This is in pretty stark contrast to other ideas I’ve had where I came up with a pretty tight plan first and only dabbled in technology that I understand pretty well.

From a tech side, I’m picturing this being something like a community based LMS where people can create courses that terminate in the learner earning a badge. Basically like Masterclass but more community driven like Udemy, but with better controls on the content.

I think some of these badges would require person to person (either virtually or IRL), and so there would have to be a way for you to connect with other local dude scouts.

Written by Kevin Coyle