Discord recently pivoted back to being gaming focused, but for the time being it’s still a great platform for developers in emerging tech to come together and share ideas.
I’ve previously written about Discord in the community context a few times now. I outline how it can be leveraged for emerging tech communities:
Empowering members with something cool to share with the community is a great way to facilitate relationship-building and engagement. Here is how the Mozilla AI community has been using Discord to bring open-source maintainers and builders together.
The Mozilla AI stage with LLM360, Camb.AI, 0din gen AI bug bounty program with Pedraam Amini and Saoud Khalifah. Ty Dunn, maintainer of the leading open source ai code assistant with dev rel influencer Techfren.
We invite members to directly schedule events on our Discord server calendar. This allows us to skip logistical overhead and focus on the content. Generating more opportunities for members to get together and reducing friction to get on stage is the goal.
You can assign a custom role to give trusted members the ability to schedule events in your discord server. 2FA a must!
Benefits to the Community:
- Encourage Cross-Pollination of Ideas
- Identify Areas for Improvement/Get Help
- Inspire Others and Educate
- Strengthen Community Bonds/Build Relationships for better Collaboration
Benefits for a Presenter:
- Moderation Support from Mozilla Staff
- Promotion Support (Mozilla newsletters, socials, subject to availability)
- Broadcasting support (Subject to availability)
- Option to add your project emoji to the server (servers support up to 250 emojis, letting event hosts leave their mark!)
Notice some of the support is subject to availability. This is because we are a small team and can’t always be there to support every event. We do our best to support as many events as possible.
Llamafile embedding demo from the great Katie Silverstein
We promote the events internally and externally and are still refining processes to deliver the most value to members and organizers. We encourage small and intimate gatherings where members can converse meaningfully on various topics.
Member events can be scheduled anytime. At a bare minimum, we must have moderation to ensure the event is consistent with our participation guidelines.
I’m very grateful for all the support we have had from our leader moderators and members in proving this framework out.
Another secret to the Mozilla AI Discord is our moderators. We have support from a great team of moderators/maintainers who help us keep the community safe and welcoming. The great Santiago Martorana of Mozilla AI, Pedraam Amini of 0din, Alex Gracia of sqlite-vec and the incomparable Justine Tunny, core maintainer of Llamafile just to name a few. Having these experts available in our space adds immense value and member events help glue us all together. They are the backbone of our community and we couldn’t do it without them.