Starting

where and how to begin

Understanding Communities

How can an individual make a change to a community

This track will focus on how you can advocate for change within a community, although it may also be useful to understand how communities of practice / purpose can be used to effect change within an organization or larger community.

Getting started involves understanding the type of community, the stage it is at, their role participating in it and how change happens within it. There are many different models and frameworks that can help you do this.

What is a Community of Practice?

• A community of practice is a group of people who share a common interest and learn from each other through frequent interaction.
• In contrast, a community of purpose is a group of people who share a common goal and collaborate to achieve it.
• Both types of communities, however, often start around a shared need or problem.

The Mountain of Engagement

The Mountain of Engagement model [Gould2020] is useful to think about how people progress from first hearing about a project or community to taking on leadership within it.

• Discovery: a person first hears about the project or community
• First contact: They engage for the first time
• Participation: They make their first contribution
• Sustained participation: They continue to be involved
• Networked participation: They build connections with the community
• Leadership: They take on responsibility

The Community Cultivation Framework [Educopia2018] is useful to identify and understand the lifecycle stage(s) of a community. Each stage has core questions the community is grappling with which will affect the way that a person might effect change in the community.

• Formation: A community organizes (or reorganizes) and develops services, tools, or shared resources to meet a need held in common by its constituents. It articulates an ethos and culture that binds the major players together.
• Validation: A community demonstrates its value and validity, broadening its constituent base and sphere of influence. It focuses primarily on external validation, exploring how others may understand, join, or relate to its work.
• Acceleration: A community scales its services, tools, or resources in order to quickly grow, demonstrating its stability both internally and externally. Communities in this stage sometimes grow fast; they also may fail fast and shift gears towards a spin-off or spin-down process for projects, programs, or the community itself.
• Transition: A community evaluates its constituents’ changing needs and engages in purposeful transition. It analyzes both external and internal changes and determines how its work can remain vibrant and relevant. Communities and their associated projects and programs may merge, spin off, or spin down.

These stages operate in a continuum, and a community may experience a stage multiple times but the community and surrounding landscape will have different characteristics.

Communities established on need will work to address their needs via innovation and organisational change. The Diffusion of innovations model [Rogers2003] is another useful way to think about how and why people decide to seek out and potentially join a community.

• Steps are:
  • Knowledge: person becomes aware of a potential change
  • Persuasion: they form a positive or negative attitude
  • Decision: they choose to implement, ignore, or oppose
  • Implementation: they follow through
  • Confirmation: the change is normalized or abandoned
• Key points:
  • People can and will drop out at any stage
  • Facts aren't enough to persuade: people want numbers, but believe stories
  • Most people neither support nor oppose most innovations
  • Most changes eventually languish even if they aren't officially abandoned

There are other frameworks for thinking about organizational change. For example, the one presented in [Heath2010] analyzes it in terms of the conflict between our rational side, our emotional side, and our circumstances. Its three key points are to describe a coherent destination, appeal to emotion to motivate people, and map out a clear path. Richard Millington at Feverbee has a lot of resources for community management, tactics and strategy.

Exercise: What Worked (or Didn't)

Analyze one recent attempt to change a community you are involved with in terms of diffusion of innovations. 1. What was the need that drove the attempted change? What was the scope of the problem and who is affected? 2. What did the advocates of the change do for each step? 3. Which steps succeeded? Which did not? Why?

What to Do First

Before you do anything else, find out who has already tried what. You may not be the first person to try to make this kind of change, and an honest retrospective is worth a cup of coffee.

1. Use existing social ties
   • Successful movements are built on pre-existing relationships [Beckerman2022]
   • "We think" is more persuasive than "I think"
   • And "we" usually have better ideas
2. Start with something small
   • Less intimidating
   • Gives you a chance to build skills and community
   • Less damaging to your reputation if you abandon or retract
3. Look for people who are already doing this work (alone)
   • Working together with others early on builds shared ownership and responsibility of any solutions or created communities
4. Pick something that is already has support
   • Improves odds of success
   • Makes you appear mainstream rather than radical
5. Pick something that is immediately useful
   • Remember, most innovations languish or are met with passive resistance [Scott1987]
6. Look for other communities who have successfully implemented this change
   • Learn from their challenges
   • Their success be used to gain more support

Avoid premature commitment to metrics, and more importantly, to target values for those metrics. It is more useful to agree on who will be responsible for evaluating the success of the change, which can also be a way to make someone an ally.

Exercise: Choosing a Starting Point

1. Individually, make a list of three changes that would satisfy the criteria above.
2. In a group, compare your list with changes suggested by others in your group.
   • What potential changes did several of you identify?
   • Why didn't they include all of yours?
   • What are the activities to support changes that people can do together?

Exercise: Being New

1. Why can it be harder to change an organization you have just joined than one you have belonged to for a long time?
2. Why is it sometimes easier to change organizations you are new to?

Who to Convince First

• A Connector is someone who knows everyone [Manns2015]
  • Help you spread the word
  • Will expect you to listen to others in turn (exchange of social capital)
• A Guru is someone whose expertise in some domain is widely respected
  • "If Oscar likes it, it must be good"

Who Not To Start With

• An Innovator is someone who is constantly trying new things
  • Less persuasive because they are known to abandon most of the things they try
• Decision Owners actually has the authority to make the change
  • Don't approach them until you're sure you have a winning coalition

Exercise: Who's Who

1. Individually, make a short list of people you think are connectors, gurus, and/or innovators in your organization. (Include yourself if appropriate.)
2. In a group, compare your list with those of your colleagues.
   • Which potential allies did several of you identify?
   • Why didn't they include all of yours?

You Will Get Advice…

• If one person you trust tells you to give up or change direction, keep going
• If several people tell you, listen to them
  • If they are generally averse to change or risk, disagree and keep going
  • If their values are different from yours, disagree and keep going
  • Otherwise, a little humility might save you a lot of wasted effort
• Be sure to distinguish disagreement on goals vs. disagreement on strategy and tactics

Sabina's Starting Point

• Sabina knows the other data analysts well, so will recruit some of them first
  • "Some of them" because the libertarian won't be useful and she needs a plausible way to leave him out for now
• She gets along well with the Director of IT, who will generally support anything that improves the quality of scientists' code
  • He doesn't care as strongly about DEI as Sabina, but is generally supportive
• Collect and share anecdotes to show that contributing to open source software projects can be a way for junior staff to improve their skills
• Use this to institute Friday afternoon hackathons
  • Participation isn't mandatory, but is tracked and taken into consideration in performance reviews
• Organize orientation and training for junior staff on how to contribute
  • "Here's how to use GitHub" (run by the Director of IT)
  • "Here's a refresher on intellectual property" (run by one of the Chief Counsel's underlings)
  • "Here's the Code of Conduct that most open source projects use" (which starts discussion of DEI issues)