GroupDAG—How to Make Friends and Help People Make Friends

Or: Decentralized Social Technology for Scalable Community Building with Self-Replicating Small-Group Cohort-Based Meetups

An often-cited problem in community building is how to make it scalable without losing closeness and trust.

It’s the famous Eternal September problem where a once-cozy atmosphere where everybody knew each other suddenly devolves into a crowd of strangers.

How do you keep things civil and friendly and help people get to know each other without becoming yourself a bottleneck?

The answer, as to many things, is recursion.

Here is how a #groupdag works:

You invite a group of people you know (3–6 including you) to meet weekly for e.g. 8–12 weeks to share updates, learnings, difficulties, goals, achievements (like a mastermind group), and to socialize around a common interest.
People take turns hosting the session so everyone gets experience in making sure everyone gets heard and the conversation flows.
Each person commits to inviting other people to join the group by talking to people they know who share the group’s interest or by reaching out to those who might.
At the end of the cycle, the group “forks” into two, and the process repeats itself.
People in different groups with a common parent group stay in touch by sharing a wider space in a chat or forum and possibly by having a bigger monthly meetup with sibling groups.
When the monthly meetup gets too big it can also fork, and so forth up the tree into yearly conferences, etc.
Groups who don’t grow enough to fork (people change interests, life situations, etc.) can “merge” with others on the next cycle (hence DAG).

Sources

Get Together, Bailey Richardson, Kevin Huyhn, and Kai Elmer Sotto, Stripe Press
Together, Vivek Murthy, Harper Wave
Learning from Religion about Social Cells, David Sloan Wilson, Evolution Institute
The Power of Ritual, Casper ter Kuile, Harper Collins
Planting Churches That Reproduce: Starting a Network of Simple Churches, Joel Comiskey, CCS Publishing