[joenot443]

This seems neat! Your tagline encourages that you're open to everyone, not just engineers and data scientists. I think that's great, you'll find a much better engagement if you keep your funnel wide.

My question though is how could I send this to any of my friends in GIS who are only semi-technical? You mention topics like "social sciences, climate change, urban planning" - the people in those areas have wildly different product expectations than you and I. I'm a FAANG engineer and have never heard of Zulip, and if I'm being honest, clicking around the interface was not especially inviting. It was more reminiscent of a bug tracker or internal docs tool than a social network :)

I love the idea. I think that if you're serious about creating a community for GIS folks though, you may want to start talking to non-technical users and get their thoughts on the user experience and discoverability of the product. My guess is they'll have some suggestions which could really help your early growth.