A first guide to the Future Herd Discord server
You may have arrived here for an event, a workshop, or an invitation to join the wider Future Herd community. These are different ways into the same place.
What is the Future Herd?
The Future Herd is a space for conversations about collaboration, leadership, and the changing food system. It brings together people who are thinking, working, learning, building, caring, questioning, and making decisions about what comes next.
The work is grounded in the realities of food and agriculture, while making room for the wider questions around power, technology, media, ecology, culture, and collective futures.
The Future Herd is not only a podcast, an event series, or a Discord server. It is an ongoing practice of bringing people and ideas into meaningful contact—and of staying with the conversation after the first encounter.
What is this Discord server?
This server is a place where the Future Herd gatherings can happen and where the conversation can continue between them.
An event might bring people together for a particular day. A workshop might give a group a space to work on something together. The wider community might gather around a question, a resource, a project, or a person. The server gives each of these encounters a place to begin, and gives them somewhere to continue afterward.
We use Discord because it can hold several kinds of presence at once: a welcome, a live room, a side conversation, a shared resource, a quiet place to read, and a commons that remains after an event has ended.
The server is not just a venue. Its structure is part of how we try to host people: with enough guidance to make arrival easy, and enough openness for the conversation to surprise us.
You may be here for…
An event
You might be joining a Future Herd gathering as a participant, guest, contributor, or observer. Look for the event's orientation and schedule information, and check the event channels for updates, questions, and follow-up conversation.
Some people will join live. Some will follow along afterward. Some will spend time in the surrounding conversations without attending the main gathering. These are all legitimate ways of being part of an event.
A workshop
A workshop may have its own preparation materials, working space, voice room, or follow-up conversation. You will not necessarily need to use every part of the server. Begin with the workshop information and follow the path provided by its facilitators.
Workshops may ask you to make, discuss, test, imagine, or decide something together. You do not need to arrive with the perfect answer. Questions, partial ideas, and useful disagreement are part of the work.
The Future Herd community
You may be here because you want to stay connected to the people, questions, and projects that Future Herd brings together.
You can follow conversations, share something you are working on, ask a question, point someone toward a resource, attend a gathering, or simply remain nearby until a conversation calls you in. There is no required pace of participation.
A simple first visit
You can begin with these steps:
- Adjust your notification settings so the server fits your life.
- Read a few recent messages before deciding where to speak.
- Introduce yourself if you want to—or simply react, ask a question, or stay quiet for now.
You do not have to explore the whole server on your first visit. One meaningful point of entry is enough.
Ways to participate
There is more than one way to take part:
- read and listen;
- follow a thread or conversation;
- add a reaction;
- ask a question;
- respond to someone else's experience;
- share a resource or a work in progress;
- join a live conversation;
- bring someone else into the space;
- help make a gathering or conversation possible;
- return later.
You do not need special expertise to participate. Attention is a form of participation. Curiosity is useful here. So is the willingness to let another person's knowledge change the shape of a conversation.
How we try to be together
Future Herd gatherings are designed to honor the people in the room, recognize the knowledge they bring, make room for them to lead, and send them back into their work with more connection and possibility than they arrived with.
In practice, that means we try to:
- make room for different kinds of knowledge and experience;
- welcome questions and honest uncertainty;
- make disagreement useful rather than performative;
- avoid assuming that everyone has the same time, access, bandwidth, or comfort with public conversation;
- share attention rather than allowing one voice to occupy all the space;
- leave room for surprise, dissent, and unfinished thought;
These are not instructions for sounding agreeable. They are commitments to making conversation more substantive and more possible.
Discord, briefly
A few Discord terms may help:
- A server is the shared space you have joined.
- A channel is a particular room within the server, usually organized around a purpose.
- A thread is a focused conversation branching from a message.
- A mention uses
@to notify a person or group. - A voice channel is a live room for audio, video, or screen sharing.
- A reaction lets you respond without adding another message.
You can use Discord from a computer or mobile device. Some controls and labels look different between them. If the interface is unfamiliar, begin with the server's orientation information rather than trying to learn every Discord feature at once.
If you need help
If you are unsure where to go, ask. If something is inaccessible, confusing, or not working, let the hosts know. Feedback about the server is part of how the server becomes better.
Begin wherever you are
You may be here for one event, one workshop, one question, or a longer relationship with Future Herd. You may contribute immediately or take time to find your place.
Begin with the reason you arrived. Follow what interests you. Notice who and what is here. Return when you can.
The future is not something we wait to encounter. It is something we make more possible by how we show up with one another.