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Yashraj Nayak
Yashraj Nayak

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How Community Builders Can Bring Existing Offline Communities Online

Venues are closed but minds are wide open 💡

I am Yashraj, I have been building and growing developer communities and programs for over four years now.

Recently, I was invited to speak at CMX Connect Mumbai Chapter. Looking at the current scenario, the first topic we discussed was how community builders can bring their existing offline communities online.

Few days before this talk, someone had asked me "In this increasingly virtual world, are local tech communities still relevant?"

I think here we have two options:

A. Wait for things to get back to normal.
B. Take this as a challenge and try to reach as near as possible to the offline experience, in an online environment.

In my opinion, option B is worth a try. It is important to realize that our community already existed before COVID-19 happened. People with shared mindset and shared struggles were already connected and this is what built that community. They can still be brought together online as they won't change their preferences over night.

More than the location, there must be reasons why they were part of your local community and absence of offline meetups shouldn't stop them from coming together online.

In this 6-minutes video, I have shared some actionable insights on how offline communities can be brought online:

This is a part of full session I hosted on "How to Engage Communities During Changing Times"

If you're a community builder and found this talk helpful, please let me know your views in the comments and if possible, please share with other community professionals in your network :)

https://www.linkedin.com/in/yashrajnayak

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