The founder of Pear Garage, a Stanford hacking community, tried scaling the program remotely across campuses during the pandemic. It failed. Genuine connections don't work over Zoom, so they went back to small in-person groups where the program actually built community.
What's an example of something that didn't go as planned that you learned from? From very early on, we run this community program at Stanford. It's called Pear Garage. We've been running it for many years, and it's really meant to be a community of people that like to build things together. So we would get students that were computer science, engineering, hackers basically to come to our office. We'd hang out, have pizza, meet people, you know, have kind of hacking sessions together, et cetera. So when the pandemic came, we're like, oh, you know, we'll just do it across all campuses and this will be our time to kick it off. So we run it remotely. We had people, students from a bunch of campuses, and it was just not effective. I think part of the reason was that it's really hard to build community on Zoom. I think a lot of us are familiar with that. So we went back to small, in-person, local communities for that.
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