Switchboard Success: Josie Finds Interviewees on the Wheelwomen Switchboard

Last month, we launched the Wheelwomen Switchboard—a Switchboard for cyclists who identify as women nationwide. (You can read more about it in the Oregonian and BikePortland.) Since its inception, dozens of wheelwomen have posted asks and offers, and logged successes. This is just one of those success stories.

Josie posted an Ask on the Wheelwomen Switchboard a few weeks ago looking for people to interview for her blog, Life on Two Wheels. Josie uses her blog to chronicle her own adventures in the bike world, but also as a place for other cyclists to share their experiences. “My hope is that the stories will inspire others to get on a bike,” Josie says.

Josie’s Ask has led to two interviews with other wheelwomen so far: Emily, from Marin County, California, and Whitney from Seattle.

Josie says that the Wheelwomen Switchboard makes it easy for her not just to interact with other like-minded wheelwomen, but to inspire members of the community in turn. “I’m somewhat shy in real life, but online I’m much more outgoing,” she says. “It’s been very positive to ‘meet’ new people and make new friends. The stories that I’ll be sharing (and have shared) are really great and I hope will inspire other people as much as they have inspired me.”

For Josie, Switchboard’s strengths are its simplicity, its scope, and its ability to bring members of a loosely connected community together. “It was easy to step into and use. Not only getting responses but finding other topics to chime in on,” Josie says. The Wheelwomen community is spread out across the country and bound together only by its members’ mutual love of biking. Switchboard gives its members a place to connect in collaborative, meaningful ways. “The bike riding community isn’t just in ‘one town’ but it’s all over. Everyone has something they can bring to the table and share!”

Announcing: Live Filters on Switchboard

Hello from sunny Portland! Spring has arrived!

Over the next month we’ll be releasing some new features you’ve asked for. There’s a new one we pushed up today. Notice anything new at the top of your Switchboard? That’s right: live filters. Behold!

We’ve heard from you, our wonderful users, that you want to easily find what you need on Switchboard. Filters helps you do just that. Interested in all OFFERS for JOBS in SAN FRANCISCO?

Want to see all ASKS for ADVICE within your community?

Just curious about all of the ASKS in SEATTLE? 

But wait, there’s more! You can also add a search query within the filters. For example all STARTUP POSTS.

Magic!

Go visit your favorite Switchboard community, login, and let us know what you think. Portland Startups Switchboard is a good place to start.

Never heard of Switchboard? Learn more and build a Switchboard for your community!

Stay tuned for more feature announcements and please keep the suggestions coming!

Making Generosity a Tradition Since 2012

This spring marks the second year Switchboard has been in operation in our pilot community, Reed College. We’ve undergone significant changes since then. Two years ago, we were just a bunch of ragtag self-starters. Now, we’re…well, we’re still a ragtag bunch of self-starters. But we have officially partnered with Reed, and more members of the community use Switchboard than ever before.

The users of our first, most mature Switchboard often provide us insight into what a successful Switchboard looks like. As more members of a community use and contribute to their Switchboard, “Switchboard” becomes a byword for giving, generosity, and belonging. 

According to Switchboard user Nisma, Switchboard is a mainstay of her community. “From what I’ve learned about Switchboard since it launched in 2012, it is THE place to go if you want to give to/ask from other [members of the community]. And over time it has just gotten better,” Nisma says. 

Before Nisma’s community used Switchboard, there was no easy way for people to help and ask help from others. The college’s database was clunky, obscure, and often outdated; communications on Twitter disappeared into the interminable torrent of tweets; Facebook was, well, Facebook; and LinkedIn only helped members of the community with a limited number of professional inquiries. Members of Nisma’s community, scattered across these ineffective platforms, couldn’t communicate with one another. Nisma says Switchboard has fixed that. “There was a real gap for an online space that is just dedicated to curating what the needs of [the community] are,” she says. “It seems it’s one of the first places to search when you are looking for something.”

Because Switchboard is well-loved by Nisma’s community, users like her advocate for Switchboard among non-users. “I would definitely recommend Switchboard to Reed friends, if they don’t know of it already.” Even in a community with a high rate of turnover, like Nisma’s or any college community, Switchboard wins the hearts of its users so much that it transforms from platform into tradition. 

“Which is why I’ve posted an internship/job posting a few days ago,” Nisma says. Since she began using Switchboard two years ago, Nisma has gone from asking for help to offering it, and, in so doing, has come to embody the generosity at Switchboard’s core. “I want Reedies to apply and I’d love to help them when they do.”

Switchboard’s earliest incarnation launched in March 2012. Two years later, we’re still a ragtag bunch of self-starters, but now we have users like Nisma to remind us who we are. Our users are our community, and that community is growing by the day. If you’re reading this, Switchboarders, thank you.

Share Love & Start Your Own Switchboard

Greetings from Switchboard Headquarters. 

Today is a big day. We are excited to announce that in the coming weeks anyone will be able start a Switchboard. Want early access? Sign up here. 

Here’s how this came to pass: Sean and I built Switchboard for our alma mater, Reed College. We wanted a place where students and alumni could ask for what they needed and offer what they had to give within a community they trust.  We built Switchboard to solve our own problem.

Then this unexpected thing happened. Countless people contacted us and said,”We want to build a Switchboard for our community!”

For the last few months we have been working tirelessly to make that happen. We’ve heard from bike clubs, expat communities, churches and synagogues, montessori schools, neighborhoods, public health organizations, summer camps, hobby groups, non-profits, companies in search of a useful intranet, even circus performers. Really, I’m not joking. Circus performers. 

This is the simple fact of the matter: every single person we’ve every talked to wants a Switchboard for a community in their life. It could be their book club, a poorly organized charity they volunteer for, their kid’s school, or their rural town in Washington state of 400 people. We’ve even heard from people with far-flung extended families who want to use Switchboard to create a centralized family network. 

We believe everyone who wants a Switchboard should have one. And because Switchboard multiplies love, what better day to offer it to everyone than Valentine’s Day? 

Today we are calling on all of you awesome, motivated community builders who are tired of listservs and groups and overwhelmed by likes and pages. We know you’ve been waiting for a simple way to connect with people you care about and share something real. The wait is over. 

Sign up for early access here. Make it happen. Build a Switchboard. They will come. 

With love,
Mara, Sean, and Team Switchboard

Affinity Networks Are Where the Heart Is

A recent Nonprofit Quarterly writeup on networks details two kinds of networks: “purposeful action networks” and “social change networks.” While these two categories might be sufficient for people networking in a professional capacity, the NPQ piece doesn’t mention another type of network, a network that is among all networks most easily taken for granted: the affinity network.

An affinity network isn’t necessarily organized around a shared goal, but rather around a shared experience or interest. They can be knitting clubs, religious groups, nonprofit networks, alumni communities, companies, and everything in between. Unlike purposeful action networks and social change, the “why” isn’t so much what holds an affinity network together—the “we” is. The other members of our affinity networks are the people we intuitively trust. Purposeful action networks and social change networks can be powerful allies in specific initiatives, but affinity networks will always be there to support its members on an individual basis. Remember Robert Frost’s definition: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

Social change networks and purposeful action networks are honed like an axe blade or focused and forceful like a hammer. Affinity networks are like oceans of warm waves or shading stands of forest, there to buoy and nurture you in all aspects of life. We’ve all hopefully had moments when our affinity networks are there for us—and we for them—when a knitting club member offers you a ride, an old classmate lets you stay the night on her couch, or when you offer to photograph the wedding of a member of your religious community for free.

In the hustle and bustle of life, it can be difficult or daunting to ask for help from or offer help to members of our affinity networks. Current social platforms that exist to connect people can help, but they usually aren’t the right tool for the job. They lack the simplicity and, well, love that makes affinity networks what they are. There’s no one good place for affinity networks to manifest that love as action. We hope to change that.

“Literary Technology” – How You Talk Is as Important as What You’re Talking About

In their 1985 work Leviathan and the Air Pump, the two historians of science Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer coined the term “literary technology” to describe the new style of writing adopted by 17th-century experimental philosophers, whom we would today call scientists. Shapin and Shaffer examine the debate between political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, of Leviathan fame, and the experimental philosopher Robert Boyle over whether one can establish scientific truth through experimentation. Robert Boyle’s invention of this so-called “literary technology” is obscure, and the term is itself, perhaps, academically arcane, but it can nonetheless provide insight into just how powerful the perfect word can be.

Boyle argued that with careful, reproducible experimentation he could discover scientific truths, though he recognized that these truths were provisional. Hobbes disagreed. To counter Hobbes’s claims, Boyle devised a “literary technology” that enabled what Shapin and Schaffer call “virtual witnessing.” That is, Boyle codified a set of writing practices that made it possible for experimental philosophers to convince other experimental philosophers that their claims were valid.

Boyle’s air pump—experimental technology—which Shapin and Shaffer argue was just as important as his literary technology: a scientific writing style for experimental philosophers.

Experimental philosophers who followed Boyle’s writing practices recorded their experiments meticulously so that other experimenters could read their accounts without having to witness the experiments in person. Skeptical readers could retrace the experimenter’s steps and validate the original outcome. Boyle’s innovation was important because it allowed experimenters to communicate their findings to a far larger audience than they were able to otherwise. It also provided the community of experimental philosophers a means of determining the credibility of a particular experimenter without having to rely solely on their social standing, which wasn’t always a good gauge of trustworthiness. Scientists today use an evolved form of Boyle’s literary technology every time they publish a scientific paper.

We might be hesitant to call Boyle’s literary technology “technology” at all. His air pump, a new experimental apparatus, sure, that’s technology—but his writing style? Yet defining Boyle’s rigorous method of recording experiments as technology is useful because it helps us recognize just how vital Boyle’s use of language was to the success of his methodology. The scientific method is just as much a tool as a microscope or spectrometer, and Boyle’s literary technology helped experimental philosophers refine and communicate that method. Without Boyle’s literary technology, or something like it, experimental philosophers would not have been able to productively share their findings with colleagues who had not witnessed their work first hand.

Boyle’s success should resonate with anyone in the tech world today. Finding the perfect language to describe a service is an integral part of both marketing and user experience. Users and potential customers use your language to understand your product and to explain it to others every day. Examples of literary technology are everywhere.

Etsy uses the term “community tastemaker” to describe their community members who curate hundreds of items and have tens of thousands of followers. These tastemakers show Etsy at its best. By sharing what they love, community tastemakers highlight worthy merchants and craftspeople and bring the Etsy community together over shared interests. The term “community tastemaker” creates a niche for these curators and empowers them to perform a vital role in the community. “Community” highlights the social role curators take on, and “tastemaker” emphasizes their sensibility and influence. With community tastemakers as their examples, Etsy users can feel that they too are part of a community simply by virtue of their own tastes. It’s a simple phrase, but one that continues to pay dividends for Etsy and its community.

Another example of literary technology is so powerful that it’s become a verb in its own right. “Kickstart.” Of course, the word existed as a hyphenate long before Kickstarter adopted it, but Kickstarter has written a new definition that now sits beside “to start an engine with the downward thrust of a pedal” and “an impetus given to get a process started or restarted” in the vernacular. Yet the new “kickstart” still carries some of the weight of the original phrase. When backers pledge money toward a project, the sense of satisfaction and involvement is almost as tangible as the resistance of a pedal and roar of an engine that the old “kick-start” connotes.

Our last example concerns Twitter and is more subtle than the others we’ve discussed so far. And no, the phrase in question isn’t “retweet.” It’s “follow.” Twitter didn’t coin this word, but Robert Boyle didn’t create his literary technology from scratch either. He adopted an existing mode of communication from the courtroom, where the credibility of a statement could determine life and death, and applied it to experimental philosophy. In a similar, but perhaps less dramatic, way, Twitter has taken a word that recalls the philosophical followings of great thinkers, the artistic movements inspired by prominent artists, the alliances formed under the guidance of charismatic politicians, and so on. On Twitter, everyone can feel like they’re their own expert—everyone has their own group of followers.

At Switchboard, our most powerful piece of literary technology consists of the two words “ask” and “offer.” Switchboard users log on to a switchboard dedicated to their community (knitting club, neighborhood, college) and post offers for advice, jobs, places to stay, rides, hugs, etc. or post asks for other users to help them find the same things. Members of these communities are already willing to help one another out; they just need a place and way to do it. The terms “ask” and “offer” make this sometimes abstract exchange of goodwill understandable, concrete. Reaching out to one’s community to ask for help or lend a hand is as easy as making a post. When we’re at a loss for words trying to describe Switchboard to people, we show them what a switchboard looks like. The moment they see the variety of the labels “ask” and “offer” attached to existing posts—“James is hiring an editorial intern,” “Rachel and Kim seek housing for a week in Hawaii”—everything clicks into place, and using Switchboard becomes intuitive.

When Robert Boyle devised what we would today call a scientific writing style, he did it to settle a dispute with his detractor Thomas Hobbes. Today, those of us who employ literary technologies have the benefit of not having to do battle with one of the giants of Western thought. Yet finding the right language is as necessary as difficult—as it ever has been. We hope that our using the phrase “literary technology” as a kind of literary technology itself, as a conceptual tool that lends insight into the power and uses of language, has been a helpful reminder that how you talk is as important as what you talk about.