One of the regular questions we receive is some iteration of “I’m traveling to Ireland - are there groups I should join for my trip?”

It seems most people believe groups correspond to geographic locations. I suppose that shouldn’t surprise us, given close to a billion people a month use Facebook groups in that exact way. Couchsurfing groups are generally tied to locations as well.

As a result, I wanted to clarify how you should think about joining and discovering Horizon groups (aka communities).

On Horizon, groups aren’t location specific. Our goal is to remove the geographic silos that exist in virtually every large community, to make global communities more accessible for their members. If you’re a University of Washington alumni (as I am), you should be able to connect with the New York City UW alumni community without having to find and join a separate “UW NYC Alum” group/community. StartingBloc Fellows should be able to connect with fellows in Chicago without the global community having to see the inquiry. SUPPERS should be able to find a Start-up Chile alum in Tokyo without posting a request to the entire global network.

The reason Facebook (and Couchsurfing) groups are organized around locations is the fact they are built around discussions. There is a massive signal to noise challenge any Facebook group with a diverse global diversity inevitably suffers from. Living in Seattle, I don’t care about conversations between members trying to meet in Chicago or Beijing or Capetown – but I do care about anyone coming to Seattle. Most members are not willing to sort through 99% noise, for the 1% signal they care about (in my case, people coming to Seattle). We’re not building an app to enable community members to “talk” to each other; there are plenty of ways to do that already. We’re building the most efficient way to find trusted individuals by location – which means being a member of communities such as SigEp means being a member across all geographies.

How do you get a group unlock code for a community to which you belong you ask? From a member already in the group.

Questions, or want a new group created? Drop us a line.

Note: There are a number of “public” groups you may join using our web or Android version, and will be available in iOS soon.