Skip to main content

Exit to Community: Community Culture

Exit to Community: Community Culture

How can startups create truly empowered communities? A growing network of entrepreneurs, organizers, and investors is exploring the idea of “Exit to Community”—enabling startups to transition toward ownership by their core stakeholders. There are many possible pathways towards this goal, as well as many challenges along the way. But one way or another, community ownership depends on community culture.

In this webinar, we will learn about community culture from two specialists in online communities and a digital organizing. We’ll talk about why community stakeholders are the toughest customers, how to engage them in building power, and what the key tensions are around governance, control, and making things work. After brief presentations, we’ll dedicate most of our time to a facilitated discussion based on questions from webinar participants. Expect to come away with strategies for your own Exit to Community.

View the video recording of the webinar , and see the graphic recording by Sita Magnuson of Dpict .

Speakers

  • Carrie Melissa Jones ()
  • Ari Trujillo-Wesler ()

Resources

  • “,” Hacker Noon (September 16, 2019)
  • “,” TechCrunch (February 25, 2020)
  • “,” MEDLab webinar (December 11, 2019)
  • “,” @sexandstartups on Medium (November 5, 2019)
  • “” working draft

Organized by Danny Spitzberg, community fellow with the Media Enterprise Design Lab @ Boulder, in partnership with Zebras Unite, and with support from the Open Society Foundations (which are not responsible for the content).