Community Engagement Fundamentals course via CSCCE

[sgibson91]

As part of the Community Strategic Lead initiative (#536), I am partaking in a course on Community Engagement Fundamentals run by CSCCE (https://www.cscce.org/trainings/cef/). This issue will track the work I do on that course and share homeworks I complete for transparency.

Please note that the homeworks shared here are works in progress that will be iterated on over the length of the course and beyond.

[sgibson91]

Week 1: What is Community?

The first week focussed on identifying community via it's members, actions, and arenas it operates in. We were asked to write a Community Overview Statement, mine can be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sebGnuKXg6FWNKubXDXOJoFcWsTcRBPG2DmUatrKn3k/edit?usp=sharing

We were also asked to begin thinking about a stakeholder map, but won't be actively using it until week 3. I only have a template so far, but I will be developing the stakeholder map here: https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVOiu0R0g=/?share_link_id=494836029392

[sgibson91]

Week 2: Community Management Roles

Weeks two covered the diversity of community management roles, the skills they implement, and the visibility of these roles (voluntary vs paid, creating the space for others vs being the point of contact/responsibility).

We each filled out a skills wheel that reflected which skills we had most commonly used in the last month. Obviously with this role being so young, this is mostly reflecting my 2i2c work.

https://www.cscce.org/research/skills-wheel/

[sgibson91]

Week 3: Who is in your Community?

This week focussed on the type of community members, what their needs are (both what they are upfront about and those they aren't), and how their success might be translated into community success.

We began a spreadsheet to begin identifying personas in our communities and what their needs are. We aim to flesh this out over the course of a few weeks. Mine is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ng8q3PR03LxcNhvnPoJCqoezhsGs2TY0MiD5iZkqrZA/edit?usp=sharing

Self Reflection

It is becoming an increasingly obvious tension in OSS communities that users (people who run pip install some-package) are not necessarily a part of the community around some-package, whether they are not aware or don't care or some other reason. (This is in contrast to a more "traditional" or "canonical" Community of Practice.) They often use the software for what they need to get done but don't feel an obligation or desire to contribute back (in any form, not just code). Yet the community often feel obliged to take into account the needs of this group, since without them the software probably wouldn't have come into existence in the first place. This made trying to identify the personas quite a difficult task for me as I got hung up on those who use the software and not much more (a lot of "take" not much "giving back"). I need to pay attention to the persona types that invoke more positive feelings from me there. (And the weather in the UK recently has been making everyone miserable to some extent, which hasn't helped my outlook 😅)

And so if we reflect on "who is in your community?", it feels like we are inevitably drawing a boundary between the user base and those who actively contribute and develop. I think this boundary is fine providing that it is permeable. That is, the activation energy to move from being an active user to being a contributor is low, similarly for moving in the opposite direction.

[sgibson91]

Week 4: Content and activities

This week we began thinking about content that the community members need, activities that might deliver this content, and how these content and activities are different for each member type. We were given a spreadsheet to begin auditing the content and activities currently happening in our community. I noted the Team Meetings in mine (though I could probably figure out some more, particularly async stuff, if I really sat down and thought about it) but I mostly used this to plan Outreachy cohorts. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16njEfSbtCr83JU0l2lTKiksT7O7GPxXR3I1hRqm8qoc/edit?usp=sharing

[sgibson91]

Week 5: The Community Participation Model

[Disclaimer: I actually missed this lesson to take my cat to the vets. He is fine, just dramatic.]

https://www.cscce.org/resources/cpm/

This lesson covered the Community Participation Model which tries to describe various modes of engagement community members between the CM/host org and/or each other. We then tried to map these modes onto the content and activity audits we'd prepared the week before and tried to think about scaffolding/support that a CM could provide so that members can begin to create their own content and activities with only a small steer from the CM.

[sgibson91]

Week 6: Community Champions, Lifecycles and Graduation

We covered the 5th meta-mode of the Community Participation Model which is Community Champions. Those that go above and beyond to contribute to the community. Modes of championing include Maintain, Grow and Evolve. In some cases, a community may create a specific champion programme to support these members of the community in their activities and recognise/celebrate the work they do. We inherit the Jupyter Distinguished Contributor programme which covers the recognition/celebration of champions. A good question might be, do we want to provide scaffolding/support for members on their journey to becoming nominated for that programme. If so, what kinds of scaffolding/support?

We then had a brief discussion about community lifecycles, and how the size and activities change over time. Many of the people on the course are working with pre-established communities and so we all felt we were definitely in the "mature" phase, we didn't really want to move backwards (shrink) and moving forward meant end of project. So that wasn't a wholly enlightening conversation.

This was the last lesson in the course and for graduation (happening tomorrow) we pulled all of the activities we had done over the course into a poster: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1rGOgNP09SEzXInhgtox7-Lo-XnECwx_4dgMbxu9xoHg/edit?usp=sharing

I wouldn't hold too much stock by the content of the poster since this was a very fast-paced course and I didn't always have time to do the level of deep thinking these activities required. I also didn't have time to do all this deep thinking with you, the community so this is very much a reflection of my biases. However, going forward this has given me a potential framework to use as the Community Strategic Lead grows.

[sgibson91]

Graduation and course completed! 🎉