The Future of Community and Crowds

In the future, almost every organization in the world will engage with Community and Crowds. In fact, most organizations will be just Community and Crowd. Several major predictions can also be made: 

• Cryptocurrencies as an asset class will be worth more than $1 trillion. The combination of crypto-economics and gamification will act as a staggering accelerant for assembling and incentivizing communities. (We’ll discuss this further in the chapter on Engagement.)

• MTP-based communities will increasingly grab attention and mindshare from traditional corporations.

• As grand challenges are natural MTPs, Communities focused on the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will attack global problems.

• Techniques developed in the Web3 arena (i.e., blockchain, cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and the metaverse) will move into corporate and even government circles.

• Increasingly, large corporations will realize the value of Community and seek to build theirs (usually around the brand promise).

• As AI tools like ChatGPT propagate, the importance of Community will be enhanced while the importance of the Crowd will diminish. 

• To explain the prior point, the Crowd is a proxy for AI. Tapping into the Crowd requires prescriptively describing tasks. Once a task can be described in efficient detail, AI can handle it as well as a human being. Thus, over time, the Crowd will be replaced by AI bots.

• Certain industries—for example, blockchain—have become very good at leveraging Community. The corporate world will soon catch up. Organizations will increasingly compete for limited attention and mindshare. The organizations (ExOs) that successfully attract a Crowd and convert their members to Community will be the winners.