BET300 and E-COOP Community

About BET300 & E-Coop Community

The BET300 & E-Coop Community is an alumni network for students taught by Wayne Chang across BET 300 and E-Coop, and the extended community members. It supports continuous venture development and cross-cohort collaboration among his former students.

Current Purpose

The community functions as shared infrastructure for Wayne’s alumni and community members to connect and support each other directly.

The community is structured around five functions:

• Enabling direct connections across cohorts without reliance on a central connector
• Supporting venture development through peer interaction and shared experience
• Providing a space for alumni to contribute back to the ecosystem
• Facilitating regional coordination within the Waterloo and KW ecosystem
• Celebrating successes across the community

Structure

The community is hosted on Discord and organized to support both cohort identity and cross-cohort interaction.

• Cohort-based channels maintain continuity within each intake
• Cross-cohort channels enable knowledge transfer and alumni engagement
• Role-based access allows members to identify themselves by cohort and experience

This structure supports a distributed model where relationships develop through sustained peer interaction across cohorts.

Origin

The community originated as a Discord server created by Wayne Chang and Francis as an experiment to extend the communication model used in BET 300. Slack was the primary tool for reflections, updates, and interaction between students, instructors, and alumni advisors. However, its time-based message retention and cohort-by-cohort setup limited continuity across Wayne’s growing alumni base. Discord was introduced as an alternative with more flexible roles and the ability to retain conversations over time. The server was not fully developed during its initial phase and remained largely dormant. Following Wayne’s passing and the deactivation of the LinkedIn group, the community is being reactivated as a dedicated space for his alumni to connect and support each other directly.