Scaling Caring through Networks
Last week, we launched an experiment on the topic of scaling caring, which is something my friend Brittany has written about as GM of the Union Square Ventures Network.
For anyone who is the facilitator of a network, it’s a very familiar challenge.
Across Orbital's membership, launch program alumni, advisors and friends there are well over 100 people, most of whom are individuals working on their own projects. And as the size of the network has grown, so have the number of inbound requests for help.
So, it's not at all a surprise that the thought crossed my mind: how could you make it easier for the network to help each other? After all, as the network has grown, it has also diversified and deepened its collective experience.
Last Tuesday, we invited people in the Orbital network (including our newsletter subscribers) to submit one or more requests, each constrained to 140 characters (with an option to add more details). They could make their request anonymous, and they could also opt to make their request public.
By our deadline Thursday, we received 31 requests from 21 people.
7 of the 31 requests were made anonymously
20 of the 31 requests were set to be visible only by the Orbital network, with a third being set to public
As our deadline passed, we used Trello to organize the requests into emergent categories:
Hiring Opportunities (5 requests)
Hiring for startups as well as contractors for project-specific work
Seeking Collaborators (8 requests)
Everything from co-founders to peer groups
Career Advice (4 requests)
Not a huge dataset, but half of these requests were anonymous and they centered around exploring ways in which people think about their next steps.
This was a big bucket of questions related to product, marketing, growth and crowdfunding.
Seeking Expertise (7 requests)
Lighter-weight “how do I do X” type inquiries.
On Thursday afternoon, we distributed the private Trello board to the Orbital network so that the network could begin responding to each other’s requests (huge shout out to whoever worked on the Trello and Slack APIs for making it easy to programmatically move bits around) and put up a public page (also powered by Trello’s APIs) to display the public requests.
As you’d expect, most of the engagement has been behind the scenes.
Since Thursday, there’ve been a handful of comments/emails generated from the public request page and over 80 responses from 23 different individuals. 23 of the 31 requests have received a response of some sort, which is pretty good coverage given the circumstances.
We’re still trying to help people get a response. Take a look at the list here, and answer those that you can or share them with someone in your network who can.
It’s clear that we should run this again, perhaps on a monthly basis. (If you have a request you’d like to submit, go ahead and post it here and we’ll review it and decide whether to include it with our next run)
I’d also like to try this with a different network altogether, but perhaps with a few modifications.
Finally, we’re still soliciting new members for Orbital. If you are an individual, remote employee, or a small 2-person team, here’s where you can learn more about the space and submit an application.
We’re also opening up the space on Fridays in August, for which you can RSVP here and here.
