Sri's Theory of Community | DSri Seah: Investigative Designer

EDITING PHASE:organizing thoughts

raw notes excerpted from dscafe-operations

The focus of DS|CAFE

An important limit I put on myself in DS|CAFE is that I am NOT providing a service to members for their convenience. I am creating a space where members (including myself) commune and share with each other.

As a member, I do what comes naturally to me: sharing stuff I like, verbalizing my excitement and interest with what other people share. I create the spaces here that I would use daily, and this is how DS|CAFE has some baseline of activity.
As the Admin, I happily create spaces that other people would like to use as well, but I also want them to own them and run them. It is not my job to be the battery for other people's ambitions and desires. If someone wants something out of life, I'm happy to help provide what I can to get it started and cheer people on as they report hitting milestones, because that's wonderful! But underlying this is the belief that one can be the change they wish to see.

I'm also aware that many people find "being the change they wish to see" daunting and scary. They may have lacked for positive examples of this in their lives. They may be uncomfortable expressing their own thoughts and desires because they were mocked for them by others. Or, they simply feel that their interests and ideas are not seen, appreciated, or understood. Instead, they are judged by the prevailing standards of the community which are based on tradition and the people who hold power and status in the space. DS|CAFE is specifically designed to be the anti-pattern of this and it is the mandate behind the cultural design of this space. The educational mandate is to find ways to express the culture in a form that can be shared with other communities. I think these environmental conditions are necessary for people to become the person that can be the change they want to see. This is what I mean by "psychological safety", and it occurs to me that it is a very specifically related to being a change agent of one's chosen community. So that's new!

Underlying all of this is the idea that my actions have a meaningful effect in the context of a greater community that believes in being the change they want to see. I can fulfill my own curiosity and then share it with others who value curiosity followed-up with intention. DS|CAFE is designed to help people share their experiences in this regard too, though this has become more of an administrative burden for me to manage alone. For example, our "trophy win" system is time intensive to run and I've run out of energy to scan every single channel and apply these wins while crafting meaningful commentary to go with them. There are automated tools that could help with this, but again the requirement is meaningful.

So what is "meaningful" anyway in the context of DS|CAFE? Here's an ad-hoc list of things I like to see:

leaves an emoji reaction (people feel seen)
greets another person (people feel seen AND welcomed)
verbalizes appreciation or interest in something someone has shared (individual connections grows)
shares something they find interesting, cool, or amusing (people feel safe to express themselves)
shares a cool thing they made themselves (people feel safe to express excitement)
shares a personal story (people feel secure that there's interest in their stories)
shares a personal experience (people feel safe to do, and feel that it may relate to others)
shares a practical tool, their expertise, knowledge (people are inspired to share)

These are community engagement metrics, I suppose, but they are merely the baseline for establishing the psychological safety of a community like DS|CAFE. We are blessed to have people here that naturally follow many if not all of these metrics as part of their life philosophy of being in a supportive community, which I think has helped make DS|CAFE feel cozy.

But what is beyond the baseline? That's what the challenge for 2026 is! After 10 years the operating system is largely in place, and this is the direction I'm wanting to actually talk about.

Being the change one wants to see is one of the directions. The meaningful baseline metrics above are intended to create an environment that supports this, but we don't have explicit mechanisms to nurture people who are growing into this stage. I think people who already are practicing "being the change" have their own activist groups, organizations, and/or businesses, and are unlikely to be interested in DS|CAFE as a community. They are simply too busy.
Creating the change in themselves they want to be is another direction, a rephrasing of what I think of as the combination of personal productivity with personal development. Our early #accountability room was a crude step in this direction. Our member studios were intended to be micro-incubators for people's ideas, giving them the virtual space to be as wild as they want within the supportive greater whole of DS|CAFE and its practiced values that reinforce psychological safety every day. More recently, I've started to run things like challenges, the GHDR mastermind group, and stuff like that. I deeply and dearly love seeing people creating the change in themselves, and the good lord knows that I totally find it challenging as well. It is good to be around peers who want to change and share their progress with each other.

I feel the need to do a gut check and identify my biases here. I think there's two main ideas:

That there can be a place that has a baseline notion of what psychological safety looks like as an organizational practice
That this same place can support creative works by creative people to pursue their growth among friends they make along the way

However, being a creator is not the only way to make a positive community. This gets into the Colony theory I have been writing about, so I'll have to make sure to include that with the DS|CAFE goals for 2026 so people do not feel excluded. There are many ways to contribute.

Being a creator, in the sense of someone who thinks learning how to make useful and beautiful things and then doing it is their frustrated calling, is my goal. The reason to do it is that I have this foggy belief that by sharing such things the world becomes a little bit better, and this is especially nice to share with friends.