Special situations create special closeness.
Posted: Sun Feb 02, 2025 5:10 am
At the beginning of the crisis, many people developed very intense emotions, including in relation to professional issues. This emotional intensity brought the group together, especially at the beginning, and had a long-lasting effect. This resulted in a great deal of personal closeness both in the online live meetings and in direct exchanges. Newly formed connections with people felt like long-term friendships for me too. Some new friendships will certainly remain over time, and this is probably not just the case for me.
No one can sustain such intensity for long.
But in the long run, people cannot maintain such an intensity of feeling, even if they wanted to. And that is a very good thing. But it also means that at some point a (possibly new) normal state will return. If a community action has arisen from a certain situation, then at some point it will reach its natural end. If you want to continue it, you would have to create new relevance and develop the concept further or even change it.
A community has its normal distribution.
No community can be successful without the particularly committed core mentioned above. These are people who are particularly aware of the benefits of the group for themselves, but who are also willing to create this benefit for others. This was also clearly evident from who in the group invited a particularly large number of other members.
curve_normal distribution
Some participants were there almost every day from the beginning, for ten weeks - or from when they found the group. Some came as they could. Some only joined for very specific topics and only a few times. So the forex data whole normal distribution that you can see in every community developed - but at a rapid pace. Hardly anyone, including me, would have thought that it would last so long and generate such an enormous response: the Facebook group grew to more than 300 members in just a few days, and now it has over 500. The initial 15 or 16 participants grew to almost 60 after a relatively short time.
The LinkedIn group, by the way – although it also quickly exceeded the 100-member mark – plays hardly any role in the overall picture, for reasons I will explain below.
Growth arises from the weak connections – and at the same time creates change.
One of the concepts that has had the greatest impact on my professional life and especially on building communities is "The Strength of Weak Ties" by Mark Granovetter . He proved that growth begins in the immediate environment (strong ties), but that real growth occurs as the connections to the core of the network become weaker. While the first group members came from my immediate environment, over time more and more people who were relatively far away from me in my network found their way into the group and therefore also into the morning session through contact after contact. That's because word of the offer got around surprisingly quickly.
At the same time, the shape of a very close-knit group changes with the composition. The more people joined who had no direct personal connection to me, the more the interest shifted to the knowledge that was available for free. This was particularly evident in the fact that on days with topic-specific lectures, there were often more than twice as many participants in the morning group as on days when personal exchange was the focus.
No one can sustain such intensity for long.
But in the long run, people cannot maintain such an intensity of feeling, even if they wanted to. And that is a very good thing. But it also means that at some point a (possibly new) normal state will return. If a community action has arisen from a certain situation, then at some point it will reach its natural end. If you want to continue it, you would have to create new relevance and develop the concept further or even change it.
A community has its normal distribution.
No community can be successful without the particularly committed core mentioned above. These are people who are particularly aware of the benefits of the group for themselves, but who are also willing to create this benefit for others. This was also clearly evident from who in the group invited a particularly large number of other members.
curve_normal distribution
Some participants were there almost every day from the beginning, for ten weeks - or from when they found the group. Some came as they could. Some only joined for very specific topics and only a few times. So the forex data whole normal distribution that you can see in every community developed - but at a rapid pace. Hardly anyone, including me, would have thought that it would last so long and generate such an enormous response: the Facebook group grew to more than 300 members in just a few days, and now it has over 500. The initial 15 or 16 participants grew to almost 60 after a relatively short time.
The LinkedIn group, by the way – although it also quickly exceeded the 100-member mark – plays hardly any role in the overall picture, for reasons I will explain below.
Growth arises from the weak connections – and at the same time creates change.
One of the concepts that has had the greatest impact on my professional life and especially on building communities is "The Strength of Weak Ties" by Mark Granovetter . He proved that growth begins in the immediate environment (strong ties), but that real growth occurs as the connections to the core of the network become weaker. While the first group members came from my immediate environment, over time more and more people who were relatively far away from me in my network found their way into the group and therefore also into the morning session through contact after contact. That's because word of the offer got around surprisingly quickly.
At the same time, the shape of a very close-knit group changes with the composition. The more people joined who had no direct personal connection to me, the more the interest shifted to the knowledge that was available for free. This was particularly evident in the fact that on days with topic-specific lectures, there were often more than twice as many participants in the morning group as on days when personal exchange was the focus.