Learnings from Logos Circles

Meetups
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Learnings from Lisbon & Zanzibar Circles

TLDR

  • Bring the community into the Circle. Don’t just talk about issues, invite the people facing them to sit in the Circle with you if you can. If not, go to them.
  • Different formats for different needs. Big monthly meetups are great for onboarding, but deeper issue work needs smaller, recurring groups. This may not be the case if you don’t have a large number of new atendees each week.
  • Leadership can emerge quickly. With the right mix of relationship building and context, we can identify and empower new Circle leads and volunteers in just a couple of weeks.

One thing I’ve been balancing as the Lisbon group matures is running a good meetup vs. doing what’s better for the broader Logos movement and objectives.

For example, we focus on winnable issues because they’re defensible for Logos, they let us prototype how Logos tech could actually be useful in building parallel institutions that people need, and they also give us a way to bring people together to work on something bigger than themselves, something that helps address the meaning crisis.

Lisbon Circles

We’ve been seeing about 10 new people at each meetup. Each time, I need to explain what Logos is, what Circles are, why we do this, answer questions, and build trust with individuals. That’s a lot to fit into a 2-hour session once a month.

To balance this, we’ve started meeting outside of the formal Circles to focus directly on winnable issues. Over the summer, a few of us visited diaspora communities, building relationships on the ground. This week we’re also experimenting with an open coworking session to define the winnable issue together with all the core returning members.

The current thinking is that the monthly Luma event becomes more of a top-of-funnel community onboarding session, while deeper work on winnable issues happens in smaller groups between Circles.

Zanzibar Circles (Zanzalu)

At Zanzalu, we had the chance to test Circles in a very different environment: a popup city of builders, technologists, and organisers exploring how decentralised tools can support community-led solutions.

We spent several weeks together, which massively accelerated trust-building. It also helped that Yanis already had a contact with the community school, we could bring them directly into the Circle and work together on a winnable issue from day one. Lesson: if you can bring the community or organisation you want to support into the Circle itself, things move much faster. In Lisbon, we’ve had to travel out to communities instead, which works too but is slower and more time-intensive.

Within around three weeks we achived our winnable issue ofsource low-cost Raspberry Pi devices, build an offline-first curriculum through USD 2k in crypto. It was a tangible first step toward addressing youth employment, one of Tanzania’s biggest crises

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Seconding the idea of content variety and structure: one meetup a month is great as a general gathering, as you said, onboarding new members, celebrating wins, touching base with everyone. I like to think of it like a “book club” - the place where everyone comes with their homework done or out of curiosity.

A solution to enabling people to meet more often is to secure physical space partners, like we did with AKASHA Hub in Barcelona, where memberships are €5/year, which makes an affordable choice to meet more regularly without additional coordination of the Circle Lead or Logos Core Contributors.

For London, we’re currently exploring Encode or Oasis that have a dev-friendly / builder-friendly community. Which would allow us to create a habit and use the space on a recurring basis for the monthly meetups.

Another learning is that some Circles attendees are there to learn about the tech and Logos in the context of network states, so an option could be a 2-day approach to meetups:
Day 1 - Logos Core Deep Dive (technical, use-case focused)
Day 2 - Logos Circle Meetup (community centric, less focus on the tech stack)

Merchandise:

  • Make it a practice to have a few copies of Farewell to Westphalia shipped in advance to the place of the meetup / local space partner.
  • Have more materials in zine format since it breaks the awkwardness of networking or arriving early.
  • Have a Logos overview in zine format helps people learn about the Logos technologies, so they can make their own opinions on how to possibly integrate the tech.

Community Space, post event:

  • Figure out by 3rd meetup what’s the best communication channel for the group (Signal, WhatsApp, SMS, newsletter).
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Thank you for adding your feedback! Did you have the Logos Zine on hand to give out? The print files and sticker files ect are here if you need more for your next Circle: Notion

Linked there is also the brochure that you can customise with a QR to your Telegram / Signal / Discord channel: https://www.figma.com/buzz/l7B53qCfvrWv53XsW4F20d/Untitled?t=SMTuXQLE790zOxfx-0

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Brno Circles have been completely disorganised:) We meet every month, but I mostly let the discussions flow. This resulted in an interesting situation during last meetup - we got completely naturally pretty deep into discussing how current nation states fail their citizens, what are network states and how they could work.

But there was a feedback from one participant that he does not like to “talk politics”, these discussions do not lead anywhere and that he’d much rather listen to a talk and then discuss that topic. Few others seemed to “nod”:slight_smile:

I guess this is a good feedback and I’ll need to see how to improve the agenda and format of the future meetups.

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For Barcelona and London, we had the printed zines (had about 25 for London and 20 for Barcelona). In time, an idea we’re all looking into is to replace the contents with more Circles-related content (i.e. what each local Circle has achieved, winnable issues stories etc).

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