OSCON15: Community Management Workshop
My first session at OSCON this year was hosted by Jono Bacon on Community Management.
We’ve seen a remarkable growth in community all over the world – people are getting together to make things, do things, hack, etc. Just this simple idea of peel getting together to make communities makes Jono excited (me too). If you take away the screens, computers, internet, etc – we’re all just people. We all have a basic set of concerns, opportunities, and insecurities. We all want a feeling of self-worth and to do that we need to contribute to communities (family, friends, etc). One key to this is the growth of internet connectivity. People in countries who were never connected before are getting connected – we also have the grown of smart phone use – this means that we as human beings can get to gather and connect to create communities and contribute to making, sharing, creating and more.
Open source is powered by communities! Wikipedia is powered by communities sharing knowledge and making it open! There are sustainable farming groups all over the world. We have the maker revolution. We also notice a lot more political activism because people can get together in easier ways.
Despite all of that we’re inefficient as people – these communities were all mostly accidents. We learn about communities by watching others, the renaissance comes when people swap from watching to writing it down and replicating that information.
Jono shared with us his written down/packaged thoughts on community management in this 1/2 day workshop.
If we want to build strong communities we have to start with a mission. We have to have a point and a focus. In order to assess the type of mission we want we have to look at the world we’re in. First off we’re in the post-Snowden land of privacy, the land of 3D printing and the maker revolution and a world where everyone is getting connected to the internet.
If building a community within or for your business seems like a marketing ploy it will fail. The day was broken up as follows:
We need a vision – this is the ‘fluffy’ part
We need requirements – Communities are chaotic, and that makes them fun, but we do need to have some sort of requirements
We need to make a plan – there are many communities that have naturally sprung up (the ice bucket challenge) but the very best communities have a plan behind them
We need an infrastructure
We then need to figure out how to get people involved
Once we have people join we need to measure the value of the community (especially if you’re at a company)
The key thing is refinement. We will screw some stuff up – and this is a good thing. Failure is an opportunity to be better
Want to learn more sign up at : http://communityleadershipforum.com
Community leadership is about taking all the talents you’re surrounded about and bringing them together. Contributions come in many shapes and sizes. Not all contributions are code and documentation – some of it is just ideas!
Strategy (Vision + Mission + Plans):
Vision – what are we going out there to do? The elevator pitch that will get people excited. Take a global community of connected people and make then as efficient as possible. Jono breaks communities in to two types : read and write. Read communities are those that are user groups – people who need a place to talk and share. Write communities want to get together to change things – open source projects are write communities and the focus of today.
The first thing we need to accept is that people are irrational. We need to use a bit of social engineering or behavioral economics to manage our communities.
Jono brought up the SCARF model ( Related posts:
Keynote: Licensing Models and Building an Open Source Community
How to not do support
Being a woman in an open source community
