#293: Josué and Lara talk about preparations for The Applied Geek and Gaming Summit, and review all the wonderful Geek Therapy community spaces.

Josué Cardona 0:07
Welcome to gt radio on the Geek Therapy network here at Geek Therapy. We believe that the best way to understand each other and ourselves is through the media we care about. My name is Josué Cardona. I’m joined by Lara Taylor.

Lara Taylor 0:18
Yo,

Josué Cardona 0:19
yo,

Lara Taylor 0:20
yo. Link’s not here and I start changing up my opener.

Josué Cardona 0:25
Yeah, yeah. Links not here. They are working on stuff. Doing important taggs this weekend. three presentations at tags. That’s a lot.

Lara Taylor 0:36
Yeah, I’ve got three presentations to tags. How many you guys weigh a bazillion? Right?

Josué Cardona 0:41
Ah, they’re all mine. Oh, yeah, I’m, I’m, I’m going to take care of all of them. Hopefully. Not, I’m not alone in that. But um, you know, I will be,

Lara Taylor 0:54
you’ll be there all day. all the weekend.

Josué Cardona 0:55
I may be like the architect in the matrix with like, all the screens up and monitoring multiple things happening. But I, I’m not complaining. Actually. That sounds that sounds good to me. Okay, so here’s what we’re going to talk about today. And it may be a short one, because we have to keep preparing for taggs. I literally just finished the meeting before this. And I’ll go back to it. For those of you who don’t know, taggs is the therapeutic and applied geek and gaming summit, the first professional conference and, and gaming event of its kind, presented by Geek Therapy in the bodhana group. I’m very excited about it. And I’m a little tired, but it is going to be great. And if you’re listening to this in the future, after the event has past, don’t worry about it. That’s why we’re working very hard, perhaps even harder on making sure that we were able to record everything and preserve it so that we can continue to have a version of the conference that exists until yknow taggs 2022 Ooh, breaking news. I’m assuming we’ll do a taggs 2022. And until then, we will, we will keep it up. And then you can get a media pass. And just by access to all the stuff that we recorded

Lara Taylor 2:12
a pro tip probably want the media pass anyway. Because there’s like five panels going on at a time and everything looks so good.

Josué Cardona 2:20
So assuming that you Yeah, you’re listening to this live? There’s no way I’m posting this before taggs. Taggs live is actually done. Exactly. But if you’re listening to this before, then yeah, definitely get your live plus. plus media pass. Yeah. Yeah, no, I’m excited. But so what I’m excited about partially, and what I want to talk about today is this. The theme of taggs is community, everybody has a seat at the table. And we have always made it such a core part of Geek Therapy, to build community. And so we have very specific community spaces that allow us to do that. So the podcast part is weird. It’s the main driver of content. But there isn’t like a place where you can go or where people go, you can go to the forum, basically. And that’s where all the podcasts are and where you could post and things like that. But it’s it’s it’s other places where people congregate. Primarily, we have two, which are the the discord which we bring up all the time, which has been refreshed.

Lara Taylor 3:34
It’s looking great too

Josué Cardona 3:36
Good, it’s got options for you know that you can opt in and out of all the channels.

Lara Taylor 3:40
all those people who say we have too many channels. You don’t have to have all the channels.

Josué Cardona 3:44
you Don’t need them all. Yep, yep, yep.

Lara Taylor 3:46
Unless you want them all.

Josué Cardona 3:48
Unless you want them all. I think I think, yeah, I think it’s working out really well. I like it a lot. And I love it. I think it’s I think it’s great. It’s got this new feature where we can do live events, just exactly the same way that clubhouse. The app does them right where people we can, we can have a live event where we’re talking and it’s and it’s audio only. So it’s very fitting for for us even though like we’re live right now on video on Twitch. We’re primarily audio content. And so that’ll be really cool because we can have these live events and then people can like Raise your hands and come up and we can include them in the conversations and it’s called stages. And we’ve got it set up. It’s It’s great. We might do some of these episodes that way in the future, or other things we’ll see. But we’ve got it all set up on the discord as well. So it’s great. And I I love the Discord. I think it is I think it is fantastic. Obviously we also have like things like this, we can be live on Twitch and Brandon comes into the comments and put emojis up. Yeah, right. So hey, so Hi, Brandon. Yeah. Right. So this is a space for that also, right? We’ve had the string team over the years, different people. streaming and different people in the in the audience and in the chat. And that’s one way for community building. But the Facebook group,

Lara Taylor 5:10
that thing is a beast of its own

Josué Cardona 5:12
Facebook group is at 4300 people last time I checked, which, again, I think two years ago, there was an episode where you were like, oh, we’re almost at 400. It’s amazing.

Lara Taylor 5:23
I think last year, I think last year, I was excited that we were almost to 1000. I think two years ago, it was like 400 or 600. Yeah,

Josué Cardona 5:34
yeah. Yeah. And I mean, there are there are specific, they’re very good reasons that I can pinpoint. For a large part of that growth. Some of it is like the teleplay group, right? They’ve been Kara and Zach, that group over there. They’ve been fantastic. They’re always telling people like, depending on what it is like, Oh, you should check out the geek therapy group. And there’s just a lot of members of the community who are constantly promoting and advocating for for our Facebook group.

Lara Taylor 6:04
Yeah, there’s I check every person that comes in and I look at where they heard about us. And there’s a lot of different Facebook groups that people are coming from mostly therapists groups, but sometimes it’s like ADHD support, kind of groups in a couple of neurodivergent affirming groups. I love it.

Josué Cardona 6:27
Yeah, yeah. My favorites are like, Oh, my supervisor recommended me sometimes.

Lara Taylor 6:32
my coworker

Josué Cardona 6:33
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So so the growth has been, it has been organic, like people, for the most part, it’s people suggesting, hey, check it out to people inviting their friends. And then then coming in. And I want to talk about that today. And other groups in general, we bring them up. But it is, it is so good. It is so good. Right? It is like it in a way it is exactly. It almost feels like the ideal version of what we set out to do 10 years ago, in that somebody posts a question about an anime or a video game, or they just post like a geeky reference or something like that. And then we can answer those questions. I answered a question yesterday, that was completely just technology related. And I don’t spend enough time on that anymore. The original tagline was like how can nerdy, geeky nerdy and techie things like save the world, and as someone with an electronics engineering degree, and someone who is loves technology, and is a big tech geek? I, I, we don’t do that anymore as much. Just because content ...