I have registered the domain names ftw.community and ftw.club

A summary — WTF is FTW

I’m imagining and proposing a community of professional, independent studios and practitioners who work on the open web, something between a networking group and a craft guild.

What “community” means in this context:

• DEFINITELY: A Slack workspace, ideally paid so all context isn’t lost after whatever window Salesforce lets us have for free
• DEFINITELY: Regular Zoom/Meet/whatever calls so folks can swap war stories and bond
• DEFINITELY: A place where we can share leads or find collaborators — for example, if I have a client who needs A11Y audits or content strategy, a community like this is the first place I’d ask, because I know the folks in it were top-notch
• PERHAPS: A member directory so people looking for specific services we provide can find us; this can be built such that it’s both SEO-ified and “GEO”-ified, and if nothing else more links to our individual studio sites can’t hurt
• PERHAPS: A community blog where we can (re)publish content to help share knowledge within our community, and build better domain knowledge/awareness outside of it
• MAYBE SOMEDAY: Webinars or virtual events to share knowledge, which can also be a good way to educate potential clients (and snag some leads)
• MAYBE SOMEDAY: IRL events of the kind that have seemingly died out, at least in the U.S. — think Brooklyn Beta or Webstock, but probably appropriately smaller and less scene-y
• ABSOLUTELY NOT: A stable of random people who’d join on the promise of maybe someday getting tapped for a job by our studios (this is a real thing that studios/agencies do, unfortunately)

This is a big list of big dreams, but the first two are small, achievable, and should be pretty fun.

Initially, in a “beta” phase, we’d ask folks in our communities to join on an invite-only basis as founding members. Founding membership is free for at least the first year, ideally for life. (The hedge here is if we have a paid Slack/etc, someone’s gotta pay for it, and whether that’s me, y’all, or other member tiers depends a lot on how big this thing gets.) Founding members would get all the privileges of membership, plus a sweet “founding member” badge to put on our sites.

At some point, if it seems to have traction and be worth expanding, we can open the doors to a paid membership model, priced to cover costs but not to be a profit-making business. A Slack seat is around $8/mo; I’d say a sliding scale starting around $15/mo, with larger/more stable businesses paying something like $50/mo. I’m just making these numbers up right now, but you get the picture.

A manifesto

I’m (David Demaree) a member of a community for digital agency folk called The Bureau. It’s actually a lovely group full of people who are very willing to share knowledge and support. But it’s also a very big group that includes — perhaps even crowded with — some large agencies (>$1M annual revenue, lots of employees, lots of talk about M&A and team offsites) focused on “digital marketing” (SEO, PPC advertising, social ads) with websites just one line on a Chinese restaurant menu of acronym-ed capabilities.

That the web is just part of an unholy digital marketing stew is a bigger, systemic problem that makes life hard for practitioners and agencies that focus on the web platform — we compete with bigger shops that honestly do not understand what they are selling, and when they fuck up clients’ projects, people don’t blame the agencies. They blame the web. Frustration with bad web service providers leads folks to no-code page builders or (now) AI vibe-coding things, which seem fine and empowering to the clients… until they hit an obvious, inevitable wall.