The future of community building: Exploring digital communities
Building digital communities
In a fast-paced digital world, it can seem like community building is a lost art – when really it’s just morphed to suit our digital world. You’ve likely experienced this with social media, online community boards or messaging apps. These tools have made it easy to maintain existing communities, as well as grow and foster new ones.
Take it one step further, and we have buzzwords like token, or NFT – which have been primarily held by the financially savvy. While they are complex-sounding, they follow the same definition of community we’re all familiar with: they’re based on members providing value to each other through various interactions.
With so many online communities, it can be difficult to create a sense of communal identity and understand what makes these communities valuable. One way this can be exemplified is through what we’re calling CommuniCoins, which allow the digital building of identity, credibility and reputation of community members. You may also know them as non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Simply put, they are a digital representation of an asset or interest in something, and are built on a blockchain.
CommuniCoins can deliver impact to community members by building belonging and engagement within communities – often by capturing positive interactions and moments between community members, and incentivizing important roles or identities in the community.
CommuniCoin Project
At Platform Calgary, we’re looking forward to piloting a community building project leveraging CommuniCoins, which we’ll launch at this year’s Innovation Week – our biggest community-building event of the year – where thousands of tech-curious folks will gather for events around the city that highlight the momentum that’s building in Calgary’s tech community.
We know that when it comes to creating meaningful connections, this week is invaluable. That said, it can be tough to quantify the value of these events – we don’t know exactly how many connections were made, or the quality of the connections for example.
We’re thrilled to be collaborating with partners across the Calgary ecosystem, including Interac, KPMG and Rainforest Alberta to explore how the principles of CommuniCoins can support community building by providing opportunities for attendees to engage with events throughout the week and interact with others.
From November 15-23, attendees will be able to collect limited edition tokens either by attending key events during the week, or by participating in networking opportunities, or even providing feedback to improve the community and programming. In all cases, the CommuniCoins will be downloadable by QR code.
The more involved you are in the week, the more exposure you’ll have to collect the exclusive CommuniCoins. By the end of the week, attendees who have engaged will be able to get access to special community perks and rewards.
The benefits of this experiment are two fold: it allows the community to engage in Innovation Week in a new way, leading to more connections; and it allows us to better capture the value of community interactions, collaboration and participation.
We’re looking forward to sharing more about this project as we near Innovation Week. To stay up-to-date, subscribe to our newsletter, and follow along on social media.