I was talking to a friend about KapCon, an annual Wellington RPG conference that's been going for 35 years or something ridiculous like that, and he told me that he didn't think he would attend. It didn't occur to me at the time, but my friend's social anxiety was the main blocker. He thought that the only people who attended game conferences were "pro" gamers and people who were really serious about gaming. It hadn't occurred to me to mention that KapCon is full of really fun nerds who love nothing more than to be nice to either leave each other alone or to be really nice to one another, and play games together.
And then, to my own great surprise, I myself had a similar experience when I was considering whether or not to attend a local Warhammer game. I found myself wondering whether I'd fit in. What if all the people who attended were more serious about the game than me? What if they're using balance dataslates that I've ignored? What if they make the game not fun for me?
I have no reason to believe any of this. In fact, I've got several reasons not to. I've met many of the people in the gaming club, and they've never seemed overly competitive or unkind. Come to think of it, they seem a lot like me. Nerdy, socially awkward, and up for a fun tabletop game.
I fit in with the group so much that I'm indistinguishable from the group, but I managed to doubt that I had a place in that group. I think there are probably a lot of people out there who feel similarly. The struggle isn't to find those people and insist that they join in on the fun, it's to make it overtly obvious that they're welcome in, once they find the group. This might include holding workshops in the community so that people unexpectedly learn that miniature painting and tabletop wargaming is a thing they could do. Or it might be a board game night to introduce new people to tabletop gaming. Or it might be adding graphics to web pages to demonstrate that the group welcomes people that don't necessarily look like we happen to look (even if currently our group does happen to look mostly the same.) And it ought to include using language that's inviting to lots of people. In New Zealand, that means using Te Reo, and maybe even Tongan, or Chinese on the South Island.
I don't think these kinds of things are just "tokens." I think they're ways of asserting that the culture of the group is in no way compromised or weakened when a new culture gets added in. Building culture from the bottom up means that your group culture doesn't just hover above, but is actually supported by, everyone who chooses to stand within its sphere of influence. It's an add-on feature. It can't be threatened by something strange or foreign or different.
Group culture can only be threatened when it is hoarded. If you let your group's culture be defined by a subset of members, then it's no longer, by definition, the group's culture. It's a culture supported by a few individuals, who are probably loud and definitely overly protective of it, and should they ever leave the group they take the culture with them. A group's culture must be more resilient than that. It must survive changes in membership, variation in the group's size and scope, and it must endure over time. It needs to grow and adapt. And it must be welcoming, because without new membership a group definitely, absolutely, will eventually die (because people do.)
What scares as a community member is having the culture of a group dominated by a single personality or a group of personalities. Those seem to be the people who either want to lock the group in place, or else use the group for their own advantage (and only as long as it is an advantage.) These are the personality types that crave praise and deference. They're the ones that leave a group in shambles when they don't get what they want. When it comes to community, I guess I'd rather have a coven than a devil. That makes sense, because that's the very definition of "community." It's a group, not a personality.
Your community deserves to be resilient, forever changing, and capable of constant renewal. Building that community from the people you least expect to join is a powerful way of bringing in new perspectives, new insight, and new energy.
I was on the committee for a technical conference once, and I remember the other committee members always looking to grow the conference. At the time, I thought this was learned behaviour from either corporate culture or religious culture (it's fair to argue there's no meaningful difference), and so I was resistant to it. I was also confused about who they were inviting in. They seemed to be forever mining for the next lowest "tier" of society, people who had little to no technical experience, no meaningful social influence, people who were often even seen as threats to the community because they were so different to what we were used to. I've only recently come to understand how right my committee was, because if you build community upwards toward more exposure and greater influence, you inevitably start to attract people who only crave exposure and influence. When you build a community, whether it's technological or gaming or educational or political or anything else, from folks who've fallen through the cracks, you build an authentic community that's forever looking to expand its tolerance and diversification so that it can include more outcasts, more people who've been marginalised, and more weirdos.