Community Stewardship

Two phases of the same work

The Architect phase is about design: channel structure, onboarding, community guidelines, rituals, the MVP and the roadmap beyond it. You make decisions that will shape how hundreds of people relate to each other. Get this wrong and no amount of warmth recovers it.

The Steward phase is about holding: showing up consistently, reading the temperature of the room, knowing when to intervene and when to get out of the way. This is where most community efforts quietly fail, not at launch, but in the months after, when the initial energy settles and what remains is either a practice or a ghost town.

I work across both. Often the same engagement moves through them in sequence. Sometimes a community needs a steward, not an architect, because the structure is already there and what it lacks is someone to hold it.

What I build toward

My goal in any stewardship engagement is a community that increasingly runs itself. Not because I want to leave, but because a room that depends entirely on one person to stay warm is one departure away from going cold. The best community infrastructure is anti-fragile: it develops its own distributed warmth, its own norms, its own capacity to welcome strangers and retain members without needing the founder or steward to be present for every moment.

That takes longer than a launch. It requires intentional design and patient holding. When it works, the community becomes genuinely owned by the people in it.

What this looks like in practice

• Community architecture from scratch, for creators and practitioners who have an audience and want to build a room from it
• Hands-on stewardship, showing up in the community as an active presence, moderating, hosting, shaping the culture from inside
• Advisory stewardship, working with the community founder or team to develop their own holding capacity
• Community health reviews, a structured read of an existing community’s warmth, structure, and retention patterns, with a clear brief on what to change

Rooms I’ve been in

Communities and programmes I’ve helped build, hold, or contributed to:

• Sketch Your Mind, co-steward with Zsolt Viczián, visual-thinking community built around the Obsidian Excalidraw plugin
• Digital Fitness, Dutch knowledge-worker community; moderator of the Digital Gardening space
• Linking Your Thinking (LYT), long-standing contributor across programmes
• 10K Hours of Play, community admin, alliance connector, coaching prompt library author
• CulturaGo (EdTech), programme facilitation and community support at scale

Case study: Sketch Your Mind

Community stewardship  ·  2026

Interview with Zsolt Viczián, founder of Sketch Your Mind community

The situation

Zsolt Viczián built one of the most distinctive followings in the visual thinking world, with 52,000 YouTube subscribers and 3.4 million views, who come for his Excalidraw tutorials and stay because of how he teaches. The audience had always been there. The community was an aspiration.

The conversation that started it happened at the PKM Summit in 2026. I asked Zsolt what he wanted to do next. He talked about community. I told him: that’s what I do. What followed was a genuine partnership, he brought the audience, the trust of his subscribers, and a voice that had taken years to build. I brought the architecture and the framework to turn that audience into a room.

What we built, and how

Across the last two months, we mapped the existing audience, agreed on the design, built the channel architecture, and wrote the community guidelines in Zsolt’s voice. We developed the onboarding sequence and scoped the MVP: what to ship first and what to grow into. The interview above happened at the close of that arc.

What the work included

• Community channel architecture, purpose-built for visual thinkers, not a generic Discord template
• Community guidelines in Zsolt’s voice, four variants developed, one approved, the guidelines feel like him, not like a rulebook
• Member onboarding sequence, so new arrivals understand the room before they speak in it
• Migration strategy, from informal social presence to structured community, with sequencing and pacing
• MVP vs. mature roadmap, what to ship on day one versus what the community grows into over the first year

Work with me

Whether you’re building from scratch or trying to understand why the community you launched isn’t holding the way you hoped, here’s how to start.

Not sure which is right? Book a free 30-minute conversation first.