Feb 6, 2023
Venessa Paech is an internationally regarded online community strategist with over 25 years of experience building community online. Venessa is also a PhD candidate studying the intersection of AI and community, and a global authority on communities and community management.
In the first Cohere episode of 2023,
Venessa joins Bill Johnston and Dr. Lauren Vargas to discuss the
quickly evolving role of AI in our digital experiences, how AI is
currently playing a role in online communities, and what the future
may hold regarding our collective relationship with AI.
Key Quote:
"It's still a relationship
business. It's just we now have relationships with tools and
machines in a new way: in a more anthropomorphized way and in
ways that mimic our own thinking and behavior sufficiently that we
do need to recontextualize them. So how do we do that in a way that
still prioritizes and centers the human work of what we're doing
and brings us to those core community protocols of: How are we
building a healthy, thriving, constructive space for constituents?
is it accessible? Is it productive in meaningful ways? Is it
relevant? And honoring the context, always honoring our context,
which is one of the biggest problems we do see with so many
different sorts of automated and or AI tools, is they tend to
flatten and standardize context because that is how they operate.
… But for community, which
is typically a smaller, more intimate, and more nuanced sort of
cluster of relations and ties, that does not work.”
Resources From This Episode:
All things In Moderation Conference: https://www.allthingsinmoderation.org/call-for-papers
SWARM (Australia’s Community Management Conference): https://swarmconference.com.au/
Australian Community Managers: https://www.australiancommunitymanagers.com.au/
Download the 2022 ACM State of Community Management Report
Books:
Venessa’s scholarship:
Where to find Venessa: