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Connection and Collaboration on Polywork
Hello!
I'm Cassidy, and I'm the Director of Developer Experience at Netlify, and an Advisor for Polywork, and an Advisor for Contenda, and a Chief Product Officer at Cosynd, and a podcast host, and a newsletter author, and a meme-maker, and... well many other things.
I first heard of Polywork and the concept of "polyworking" last year when I talked with their team, and I loved it right away. For someone like me, it's hard to convey online all the things I do. I have my personal website, which mostly works (except I am pretty bad at updating it), I have LinkedIn, which shows my job titles, I have Twitter, which is good for spamming the world... but nothing that really shows the right highlights I want people to see.
And thus, my Polywork profile was born! It's not fully complete, but I can't tell you how nice it is to just have a place for allll of the work I do. My little data-hoarder heart is happy.
Another element that I like about Polywork is the fact that my profile, and others, are discoverable! This is something that I couldn't achieve with my personal website (outside of just SEOing it a ton), and something that pushed me over the edge of using it more and more. I'm able to see others who like mechanical keyboards, speak at events, like memes, or found companies!
What's particularly exciting though, and something that I worked specifically with the Polywork team on, is being able to collaborate with all of these people 👀
Sometimes when you're starting a new project, thinking about a new venture, or just needing advice, it's hard to know who to turn to. On other platforms, can go through your connections and try to find the right person, and hope that they might be open to those sorts of conversations. On Polywork, you know exactly what people are open to talking about!
When you set up your profile, you can say that you might be open to collaborating on some content, being a mentor to someone, etc. By specifying these topics upfront, it's like setting virtual boundaries for yourself, and for others.
That being said: one of my favorite parts of how these collaboration features were implemented was the moderation features. We talked about this ton to get it just right, and I'm really pleased with where it's at.
When someone contacts you, and it's not relevant to the topic that they said, or something that you're open to, you can immediately ignore or block the person. I don't know about you, but as a lady on the World Wide Web I often have to deal with... creepy dudes in the DMs on Twitter and LinkedIn. On Polywork, if someone is continuously messaging people spammy or inappropriate content to other users and they get blocked multiple times, Polywork will block them entirely. By emphasizing this type of moderation first, I think Polywork has a real opportunity to become one of the safest places to collaborate on the Internet.
Polywork has a long way to go, but their team is super open to trying things that users suggest (and have been since the beginning, which is really why I joined as an advisor)! Between the boundaries people can set, controls people have over their profile, or even just reducing certain systems of stress (like no "like" buttons on anything), they've been very thoughtful, and I'm excited to see where it goes.
If you'd like to join Polywork to check it out, sign up here and use VIP code cassidoo-pikachoo.
Until next time!
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