Building a Well-Rounded Community Team
If money was no object, what roles would you hire into your community team? This post looks at how I view community team roles and how those play into team structure.
Community Strategy, Open Source & Gaming
If money was no object, what roles would you hire into your community team? This post looks at how I view community team roles and how those play into team structure.
The last of the five principles for creating community connections at scale is shared responsibility. This principle underpins all of the others and, while we’ve spoken a lot about growing community using these principles, without this final one tying them all together then we’ve essentially built a house of cards that will always be ready to collapse and isn’t going to create those long-lasting community connections at any scale.
The fourth of the five principles for creating community connections at scale is social learning. This is a huge topic that folks far smarter than me have written about, so I’m going to pick out some of the core principles of social learning here and look at how they can be applied to community building.
We all understand that meeting together is a great way to form connections and build rapport with each other. With that in mind, what I’m going to talk about in this post isn’t so much why we meet but rather how we think about and plan these shared experiences for our communities. It is only by being honest about how we bring people together that we can begin to see tangible results.
Support may seem like a fairly basic thing to focus on, but it’s far more nuanced than you might initially expect. You need to ask yourself – what do my community’s members need? How can I support them as they become more active in the community? How can I support them in their endeavours outside of the community?
I have previously written about how you can set the stage for people in your community to create connections between each other. While that post outlines a starting point – a way to initiate your community platform and get people talking – what happens down the line? As a community grows, new challenges are discovered and new solutions are needed. These five principles will set you in good stead for meeting those challenges.
Reaction or response – how can you encourage better community interactions?
This technique will help you solve almost any problem you have – in work or in life. This was originally presented as a technique for debugging code, but I’ve found it to be exceptionally effective in all areas.
Strong community leadership is important to ongoing growth. This post outlines the core principles that I believe apply to all communities and their leaders.
Yesterday I presented a workshop as part of the first CMX Global Connect event about defining a membership identity for your community. As promised during my session, here’s a link to the worksheet that we worked through together, as well as the slide deck.
You could say empathy is a skill that everyone should develop regardless of their daily work, but the way you employ your empathy is definitely a skill that people working with communities need to work on in order to be successful.
We all know how great in-person communities can be, but what happens when things don’t go so well? What happens when people in your community cause conflict and make things difficult for everyone else? Here is a practical path towards successfully mediating conflict within community.
When organising events for a community, it’s so easy to fall into the trap of thinking that bigger is better. This is an especially dangerous trap when your community is still in the early stages – shooting for a large event before your community is ready for it will inevitably do more harm than good.
Community management, particularly within an open-source project like WordPress, shares many of the same values and ideas as pastoral leadership – a path that I am deeply familiar with from my studies and experiences.
There’s a strange, often subconscious, view held by most developers – whether they will admit it or not, they tend to see other career paths as less important than what…