My Joomla! marathon started in Joomla! World Conference 2015. I was awarded as project volunteer with JET to attend JWC15! and I presented a session about Mobile Apps at JWC 2015. This community event was my first international conference to meet a big part of Joomla! community. Volunteers who daily collaborate with the project, but rarely have the opportunity to meet in person.
To read more about the experience:
Looking back, a particular session was moving and intriguing for me: JWC15 - Building and Maintaining a Healthy Community, by Priyanka Nag.
Fast forward to September 2016, I am a brand new member of Joomla! Community Leadership Team and her words have a new meaning and embody a call to my inner project manager:
- Belonging: A sense of belonging is what keeps people in communities.
- Open Communications: With an open community and publicly visible and accessible communication channels, anyone can join the community.
- Open Tools: Anyone with an Internet connection and computer can contribute.
- Community Leader: Who is He / She?
- A Community Leader's Responsibilities:
- Enable People
- Trust is everything
- The Value of Listening
- Avoid Ego, or Others Will Avoid You
- Scaling the Community
- Building the right tools
- Resolving community conflicts - CONFLICTS CAN'T BE AVOIDED -
- Multiple Communication channels
- Community TODO List
- Identify how we can divide our community into teams
- Ensure that teams can communicate clearly and effectively
- Define the scope of each teams, and help team members understand that scope
- Encourage diversity and opportunity in the community
- Produce a Code of Conduct
- Quick Steps to Resolve a Conflict
- Calm and reassure
- Get the facts
- Discuss
- Document
- Reflect and maintain
- Working with an Open Community
- Good - Open by default, real diversity
- Bad - Working with partners (Source, by Stormy Peters)
- Ugly - Not enough time, lack of commitment, meetings
To the moon!
Excerpt
Open Source organizations and projects are driven by the strength of its community. We have often seen but how big communities fall because of wrong ways of handling it or mismanagements. My talk will be around the lines of how a community leader or manager can take a few extra responsibilities to keep a community healthy.
Description
Being in the Open Source world for the last 4 years, I have got opportunity of working with several different communities. I am also currently working as community manager, here at Scrollback.
Communities are tough to build, true, but what we often forget is the fact that once built, these communities are even tougher to be maintained.
There are some very simple rules around maintaining the health of these communities. Through my talk, I would like to point out a few of those simple tricks to building and maintaining a healthy community.
