Keynote: I Planted the Seeds of a Community. It Emerged, Just Like My Rice.

Yidan Xiong grows rice. She also grew a community, and her talk is about how alike the two turned out to be. You prepare the ground, you put the seeds in, and then most of the work is tending and waiting. What comes up is not the thing you built. It emerged.

Her CV is the opposite of farming. Seven years of marketing and business development at global scale, executive secretary of the ECI Awards and the Effie Awards Greater China, marketing director for a blockchain company in Shanghai, more than 15 countries visited to open markets and find partners. All of it the work of making things happen on a deadline.

Rice does not care about your deadline. You prepare the ground, you plant, and then the growing is out of your hands. This talk is about what happened when Yidan treated a community the second way instead of the first: less building, more tending, and something that arrived without being designed.

It is a useful thing to hear in a room full of people trying to start something. Most advice about community assumes you can construct one. This is the case for planting one instead.