Community infrastructure

The primary export of my mission statement:

Build community infrastructure using my creative & technical skillsets.

I'm using the word "infrastructure" pretty loosely here, because I believe many kinds of creative & technical works can act as a foundation for something bigger. Music can be reinterpreted through other media & inspire fellow creators; platforms can facilitate more cross-pollination of ideas; a helping hand can serve to amplify and bolster our community's efforts.

However the infrastructure manifests, it should be purpose-built for a specific community. The needs & desires of a community often diverge from those of the general public (and even neighboring communities), even when those needs appear superficially similar. † Building for a community requires a thorough understanding of these underlying motivations, which in turn requires not only participating in said community, but going out of one's way to start conversations about these needs & desires.

† For a somewhat contrived example: a book club, a speedrunning community, and a local political campaign might all share the need to communicate online & easily invite new members – two functions that Discord could serve. However, the book club finds that Discord's multi-line text formatting capabilities aren't suitable for large blocks of prose; the speedrunning community struggles to collate & disseminate strategies from years of chatlogs; the campaign's constituents desire more privacy & better vetting of newcomers.