Practice Notes
At Bill Johnston's Structure.Community Fall Summit, I asked a room of community leaders to treat what they know as something they own. Here's the talk, the story behind it, and three things you can do this week.
Make-believe numbers fall apart the moment a CFO asks how you got them. Mark Birch joins Chris and Marius on bridge metrics, measuring for the whole business, and the one metric to retire.
Every community manager's morning starts in the forum. Marius Ciortea's Daily Brief hands that read to AI: it ranks what needs you, spots the patterns and drafts replies, while you decide what goes out and who answers. It runs from a chat plan and a browser, free for Claude and ChatGPT.
Everyone building with AI is talking about context. Community managers have been doing the same work for twenty years without the name. Here we trace the word to its root — contexere, to weave together — and follow it into the member who exists as four separate records in four systems.
Slop isn't "AI wrote it." It's what happens when someone uses AI as the easy button, and what it costs a community is trust.
The case for an AI policy your team can run and your executives will fund — built backward from what inaction actually costs.
What AI slop actually is, why we can smell it, and who gets to decide.
Generative Engine Optimization is a real job with a real budget line coming. In most organizations nobody has claimed it yet. Here is the case that it should be you.
Community Assistant AI Podcast Episode 000
We built a world that rewards firing before aiming. AI is the first tool that punishes it immediately, and regularly. This is the foundational column of our co-learning community: the practice that matters more than any tool, model, or trick. Carefully plan before you prompt.