Wasan session: Intentionally designing a thriving community with Marc Fonteijn (November 2025) скачать в хорошем качестве

Wasan session: Intentionally designing a thriving community with Marc Fonteijn (November 2025)

Meeting Purpose: To learn from Marc Fonteijn's intentional design of a thriving community. Key Takeaways Intentional Design for Sustainability: The Circle is designed for long-term sustainability by limiting membership to 150 (the Dunbar number) and charging fees from day one to ensure financial viability and member commitment. High-Touch Onboarding for Quality: A rigorous onboarding process (questionnaire → call) ensures member quality, which is the community's core value. This filters for committed participants, resulting in a low (~5%) rejection rate. Structured Engagement Formats: A "heartbeat" of two monthly sessions per cohort—the reflective "Dinner Table" and the tactical "Water Cooler"—provides a consistent rhythm for members across time zones. AI for Scalable Knowledge: AI tools make the community's knowledge archive instantly searchable ("Spark"), proactively surface past discussions ("Daily Spark"), and automatically create podcast summaries ("Dinner Table Debrief"), solving the problem of inaccessible recordings. Topics The Problem: Isolated Professionals The community's core driver is professional isolation. A key metric from semi-annual surveys shows 64% of members have one or zero service design colleagues in their immediate team. This isolation creates a strong need for peer connection and shared wisdom, which the community is designed to provide. The Solution: Intentional Community Design Core Principle: A healthy community is a sustainable one. Sustainability Pillars: Financial: Membership fees are required from day one. Rationale: Ensures long-term viability and filters for committed members. Tiers: €120/mo (employer-paid), €60/mo (self-paid), €30/mo (low-income countries). Structural: Membership is capped at 150. Rationale: Based on the Dunbar number to foster trust and intimacy, while providing critical mass for diverse perspectives. Onboarding Process: Goal: Find "more of the right members," not just more members. Steps: Website review → 5-question questionnaire → 1-on-1 call with Marc. Outcome: A highly committed member base with a low (~5%) rejection rate. The Engine: Structured Engagement "Heartbeat" Concept: A consistent rhythm of events is essential for community vitality. Cohort Structure ("Houses"): The 150-member community is divided into 4 "houses" of ~25-30 members each, meeting at different times to accommodate global time zones. Monthly Session Formats (2 per House): 1. Dinner Table (2 hrs): Purpose: Reflective, future-oriented discussions for deep wisdom sharing. Format: Member-hosted; a provocative prompt leads to breakout room conversations. 2. Water Cooler (1 hr): Purpose: Tactical problem-solving for day-to-day challenges. Format: Lean Coffee-style; members vote on topics, and the person with the most votes gets the "hot seat" for 8–12 mins. The Innovation: AI-Powered Knowledge AI tools were developed to make the community's knowledge archive accessible and actionable. 1. Spark (AI Assistant): Function: Instantly searches the entire archive of session recordings. Output: Provides summaries, timestamps, and links to relevant sessions. Also: Helps members discover peers with specific expertise. 2. Daily Spark: Function: A Discord channel that shares a daily "nugget" from a past session. Purpose: Proactively surfaces valuable content members might not know to search for. 3. Dinner Table Debrief (Podcast): Function: An automation that turns each 90-min session recording into a 10-min private podcast summary. Output: AI-generated description, timestamps, key takeaways, and quotes, delivered via a private RSS feed. Voices: Community-voted AI voices host the podcast. Growth Strategy: Initial Growth: Organic, driven by Marc's 10-year podcast audience and referrals. Current Challenge: Growth has stalled at an equilibrium where new members equal departures. Lesson Learned: A deliberate growth strategy is needed sooner to overcome this "glass ceiling." Operational Model: Marc's role is primarily strategic: member acquisition and experience design (e.g., AI tools). He attends 3 of 4 house sessions, with a minimal host role. He works with a small team of contractors (ops, design) to free up his time for high-value work. Data & Privacy: A 6-month co-creation process with members produced a handbook on data use and privacy. Members are explicitly informed about data use and reminded they can go "off record" during sessions.