Community platforms
Bearings — infrastructure for a global community
A multilingual platform that turns a worldwide community's scattered places, events and directories into shared infrastructure.
- Technology
- Custom web application
- Link
- Visit ↗
The problem
A large, international community’s knowledge — who runs what, where things happen, when to show up — lived scattered across social posts, group chats and memory. There was no shared place that held it.
What it is
Bearings is a community platform for a global community. It organizes the community’s information into browsable directories and a worldwide events system.
- Directories — Places, Digital, Clubs, Titles, Creators and Shops.
- Events — a “when & where” listing filterable by time range, region, country and event type, grouped by month and by region (North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America).
- Timeline & follow — archive and future views, with a calendar feed, RSS and an API.
- Multilingual — English, Español, Français, Deutsch, Português and ไทย.
The design intervention
The work is information architecture at community scale: deciding how places, events and people are categorised so the whole thing stays navigable as it grows — and making the events data reusable through a calendar, RSS and an API rather than trapping it in one page.
The technology selected
A custom-built web application — enough structure to hold directories, a filterable events system and multilingual content, with the event data exposed as shared infrastructure.
Lessons & next improvements
Community infrastructure is as much editorial as technical: the categories are the product. TODO(founder): confirm any specifics or outcomes you want stated.