Hi @rachelkate.miller and @bwhitwell,
Hope you’ve had a wonderful summer! I had the opportunity to relax this summer, visiting Taiwan to support their local education entrepreneurship community through Startup Weekend Education, spend time with my significant other, and also watch quite a few Netflix shows.
Now that we’re looking to the new year, I’ve been thinking about our next phase post the online forum launch and the youth-led collective impact gathering. To me, the gathering both bookended a period of great work and marked the beginning of Phase 2.
Phase 1 was all about user research, launching, and initial tests! In this, we were incredibly successful. Brad, you guided the product side of things, utilizing your product management skills to make us strategic in our approach and coordinating to get the tech up and running. Rachel, you always brought our work back to who our community is, what it’s for, and how might we take that very next action step. I’m so proud of the work together.
Phase 2 is what we discussed — using our forum internally and growing naturally from there. We’re using it right now for
- Organizing our work (e.g. #online-forum)
- Following up after events (e.g. youth-led collective impact gathering alumni group)
- Communicating with the broader community (e.g. #announcements)
Meanwhile, we’re making moves to complete the following
- Rachel on renaming and branding
- Me on governance and financials (recruiting a board, building a budget, and securing a fiscal sponsor)
- Me on community events and follow-up
Brad, I’d love to have your input on what next for you! Phase 2 is quiet on the product and technical side of things, where we’ll do more small tweaks than large changes. The next big thing would be, once we’ve got a new name, we’ll need to make the migration to a new domain. How do you feel about coming back then to guide the operations process with Sean?
Finally, I think it’s crucial to formally wrap up Phase 1 with a huge thanks and shout-out to all the people who supported. You two, especially, and our Slack users, survey respondents, interviewees, and user testers. This will include
- Post in #announcements ✓
- Welcome to the new online forum!
- Many thanks to the people who contributed to this + list of names and how they supported
- Why we chose the platform we did
- How we’ll use the forum next
- Post in Slack ✓
- We have a new online forum!
- Many thanks to the people who contributed + link to announcement above
- You are welcome to come and sign up
- Personal email to each supporter ✓
- We’ve launched the forum with your support!
- Thank you for how you supported
- Come sign up, look out for an invite to our back to school potluck party
- Thank you again from the online design team
I will write these all up and have a window of time open for your (totally optional) review.
Rachel and Brad, let me know if I’ve got your thumbs up!