Community Engagement Assignment 2: Design Thinking
For having a community that is essentially all dependent on technology and social media with minimal day to day action, the whole design thinking process definitely stumped me. Upon further reflection of how I should be trying to reach out to people, I started to think that maybe it wasn’t going to be that hard at all BECAUSE the main interactions of this community are online.
Social media outreach will be key in how I engage my community. Since I already have a large group of people to survey and talk to from Twitter, getting them to share and retweet my questionnaires will be the first step. When it comes to actually speaking with people though, I plan to use Discord, a social media app that gamers tend to love more than Skype. Discord allows users to create their own “servers” with multiple personalized chat rooms with text and with voice. Aside from the servers, Discord allows for private calls and messages between multiple users. I believe forumboards for particular games and interests are fading out. Most gamers really do use Twitter and Discord for their interactions.
While interactions online will probably be my main source of communication, interactions with people in person will also be rather easy for me to culminate. Being a gaming nerd in Manhattan only gives you so many places for you to go and find other nerds, so I know the spots where I could potentially talk to people like the Waypoint Cafe, an internet cafe tucked into the Lower East Side, and certain arcades in Chinatown.
I would be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous about trolls. Trolls that come from gaming in particular have a reputation for being absolutely brutal toward all minority groups in the community like people of color and women. I worry that they will come into my surveys and skew numbers or answers. What I could do to particularly avoid this is gather an interest group and make sure their online profiles are legitimate before distributing the survey.
Even talking about how I am going to interact with my community is really exciting. I can’t wait to get started.
