You are me and we are all together?
Of course, this headline comes from a Beatles tune, but I think it reminds me of community. Across my career, I’m fortunate to have been part of many different communities. The missions, goals, and approach of each are unique, and yet one thing is the same - they are made up of people with shared interests or values working together. Some communities celebrate individuality of participants, some seek to unite and equalize all. How can we assess and identify what the best approach to community is?
Working for commercial publishers, there is a way in which I observed that we, on the publisher side, were both participant and at times gatekeeper and facilitator of, for example, the societies we worked in partnership with.
Working for proprietary SaaS vendors, we convened communities of customers and the end users within their organizations, and we also participated in fostering integrator or partner community.
Volunteering in professional and civic settings, we seek to generate interest via grassroots strategies. In this context everyone is strapped for time and every moment spent is a very generous contribution.
In academic settings, the community forms around the momentum built while exchanging ideas, challenging one another, and expanding our views together. We sit in classrooms and are in a performance based context but that framing is less important once the spark of real, good faith community has been ignited.
Working in Open Source community we facilitate the delicate ecosystem that is healthy participatory collaboration. No end users, just use case specialists. No clients or customers, instead partners and friends.
What I am struck by thinking back across diverse approaches, different meeting formats and communications tones, is how within each the community essentially is exactly only and completely what those participating in it want it to be. Whether the facilitating organization seeks to tightly control a community or an event, or they empower the community or event to be what it wants to be, the total value is always what the individuals participating enable it to be. If they bring low energy, it’s low energy, and no amount of artificial hype will change that. If they bring zeal it is feisty!
This reminds me of how much leading community is like parenting. You can have your own agenda, but ultimately, the outcome is totally out of your hands. The longer view is to stay involved, stay positive and open, remaining wiser than to seek to boil the ocean, or too tightly control the thing that cannot be controlled. That would strangle community, I bet.
Coko’s core methodology, the Cabbage Tree Method, includes a chapter about facilitating use case specialists to design systems- not digital officers or tech leads- use case specialists, or in other words, the people who will actually do the work with the tool post-development and release. In that section was a memorable passage stating that no one speaks for the use case specialists aside themselves. This is a cardinal rule of the collaborative design sessions the methodology advocates facilitating. While the passage is quite specifically speaking about this concrete process, I think the reason it resonated with me is because it gets to the spirit of what I think makes community succeed. For me, it doesn’t matter if it’s a user community, a community of bank customers, or a community of volunteers working together: no one else can pre-empt your own experience in the community. It’s totally yours, else the community is failing you. At the base, it is about trust.
In other words, I don’t think anyone can speak for the community aside its participants. While at times they may disagree, it is this kind of generous and open approach that will keep them feeling safe and welcome regardless of anything else.