Weave - Building for Belonging

Author

Aaron Gabriel Neyer
May 17, 2024

Welcome to the Weekly Weave!

Woven Web is a community rooted in Boulder Colorado and reaching beyond, with a deeply held vision for a more connected world. We seek to find greater harmony between technology, society, and nature through understanding self and all of it's creative and destructive potential.

In this Weave

  • Building for Belonging

  • Coming Up in Community

Building for Belonging

This week in Boulder was Boulder startup week. I’ve been really enjoying weaving into this beautiful energy full of inspiration, innovation, community and connection. Today it has me reflecting on the importance of building in connection and for connection. I’m feeling inspired by a recent article written by a core member of our team, Jon. I’d recommend reading it, in short he talks about the value of building with friends, and how valuable this is not only for building meaningful things, but getting to build meaningful relationships throughout that process.

At startup week, I spent a lot of time in the builders room, where there was a small hackathon integrated within the larger startup week. I had the opportunity to connect with a number of fellow builders and make some progress on a project that myself and some other Woven Web folks are working on, an app to facilitate more spontaneous in person connection. We’ll be sharing more about that before too long, as we think that building in the open is really essential if we want to support technology moving in the direction that genuinely supports connection.

One of our core interests in woven web is facilitating more belonging in our wider community. We want for people to come to Boulder (and beyond!) and feel that they belong and that their contribution and their participation matters. Many of our existing systems, both social and technological, don’t do a great job at fostering belonging. The innovations that are needed is not just in the outcome or the systems we build, it’s also in how we build the systems, as Jon’s article points out. We have to feel meaningfully connected to what we’re creating and who we’re creating it with for that creation to have the kind of impact that we likely desire.

What ways do our existing systems do a poor job of fostering belonging? What are some specific examples of systems that could use improvement? What ways might we change these systems? And how can we integrate a sense of belonging at every level of this systems change work?

Coming Up in Community

This space is evolving. As we develop better systems, we hope to more effectively share with you a cohesive weave of what’s happening in community.
In the meantime, check out some other great community calendars:

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See you in the web,

~ aaron gabriel & woven web