Understand the difference between our "Product and Community Lead" role and a "Community Manager"

[choldgraf]

Context

Our current hub service model is essentially a collaborative team with three roles:

• Hub engineers - manage cloud infrastructure and develop open source tools
• Product and Community Lead - guide community leaders in using infrastructure, do some community support, and interface with our engineering team to guide development
• Community Manager - manage and organize the user community and provide more usecase-specific support and guidance

The last two roles ("Product and Community Lead" and "Community Manager") have overlapping skillsets and responsibilities, but are distinct roles in the service.

Proposal

We should investigate the differences between "Product and Community Lead" type roles and "Community Manager" roles, in order to understand how to define the "Shared Responsibility Model" for these two roles in our service. Some questions that we want to answer:

• Titles: What are the right titles to describe each role? Should we draw from pre-existing titles or define new ones?
• Responsibilities: What are the individual and shared responsibilities for each role?
• Training: What training does a Product and Community Lead need in order to be effective? What about Community Managers?
• Capacity from community: What is the realistic capacity of other communities to fill the "Community Manager" role responsibilities?
• Guidance: What guidance can 2i2c provide other communities to grow their own "Community Manager" capacity and collaborate with us?

Timing

This is probably going to be an ongoing question that will take some time to figure out, so I suggest we break this down into short-term goals and checkpoints, and close this once we have some documentation that has roughly stabilized.

References

• Notes from a brainstorm with the Turing Way team about RAMs vs. Community managers
• Research application manager page via the Turing Way
• Presentation from Turing Way about the difference between CM and RAMs

Updates and actions

No response

[choldgraf]

Some takeaways from a recent conversation with Turing folks

I just chatted with @harisood and @aldenc about some questions around community building within 2i2c and other communities. Here are some quick takeaways:

• What impact does 2i2c want to have by facilitating connections between communities that we serve?
  • To facilitate cross-community information flow/sharing, and potentially interaction and collaboration
  • To allow the lessons that some community learn through experimentation to "bubble up" to a cross-community level for others to learn
  • To offload some support and question answering duties onto other communities
  • To have shared spaces for some kinds of information to avoid unnecessary duplication
• How will we know what kind of structure to put in a '2i2c community space'? What is in- and out-of scope?
  • It is hard to know ahead of time!
  • Maybe we should just set up a 2i2c space for community members, leads, etc to interact in, and see how they use it.
  • Try to provide guidelines like "general workflow questions and infrastructure questions in a 2i2c space, and if you have domain specific questions we encourage you to use a community-specific space for this"

let me know if any other major points stood out to you @harisood or @aldenc !

References

Some references that came out of this:

• The MiniScope community is an online community that organizes around an open microscope spec, and has an active forum
• The Coloring Cities project has a collection of sub-communities and some governance structures that connect them

[harisood]

LGTM! One thought is that for community-specific spaces, it'd be good to actively assign someone to be the leader/organiser for that space - so there is a clear point of contact between the 2i2c governed spaces and the more domain specific ones.

[choldgraf]

Takeaways from another Turing conversation

I had another conversation with some Turing folks today, this time with @malvikasharan @aldenc @harisood and @Arielle-Bennett (please let me know if you'd like me to add any major points).

Here were some main takeaways I recall (raw notes in the HackMD linked in the top comment):

Three major questions we'd like to answer

• Where is the line between 2i2c's community and other communities?
• How do communities connect with one another?
• What should we ask other communities to do as part of our collaborative service model?

and a few topics related to this:

2i2c spaces for conversation that include community spaces

• We want communities to learn from one another and encourage them to act openly
• Communities also may want their own spaces for conversation etc.
• We could create a single space for online conversations amongst communities, and sub-spaces that are community-specific if they requested.
  • e.g., community.2i2c.org might be a Discourse forum, it has several top-level sections that cover community-agnostic workflow questions. We encourage community members to participate with one another in this space and we also engage there.
  • In addition, we might have sub-sections for community-A, community-B, etc. We empower community leaders to structure these spaces as they like.
  • We recommend that communities search and participate in other community spaces as long as they are OK with this. In this way they can learn from one another.
• This may also depend on the community size
  • Small / individuals -> send to 2i2c's community forum or hubs, recommend they connect with other pre-existing communities (e.g., a research group)
  • Slightly bigger -> dedicated hub, dedicated channel in forum if they wish (e.g., a workshop)
  • Much bigger -> dedicated forum, dedicated cluster if they wish (e.g., Pangeo)
• Once a community got to a certain size, perhaps they would want to have their own dedicated space for conversation. We could recommend when and how this should happen.
• It will also help us demonstrate impact if we have a public record of communities that interact with one another via 2i2c.

Growing community management capacity in other communities

• 2i2c should encourage communities to grow leadership/self-management capacity and collaborate with us on the service.
  • Might need to push them out of their comfort zone a little bit
  • Want to encourage them to adopt more open and collaborative practices
  • Might need to train and support them in doing this.
• Could we partner with another organization that specializes in teaching community management so that we can leverage their expertise instead of doing it ourselves? (e.g., CSCCE, OLS, etc)
  • E.g., 2i2c does guidance and engineering around the service, and recommends other communities step-up to collaborate with us on it, but the process of teaching other communities what this means is carried out via an external collaboration.
• Could we use 2i2c funds to cover the time of some community leaders that serve in these roles? (Similar to an idea @jmunroe had)

A potential model to pitch funders

• Find a collection of communities that would benefit from the infrastructure and workflows that 2i2c provides. Needs to be large enough to show impact on its own.
• Train this community in open and collaborative practices (via a partnership with a collaborator or doing this ourselves)
• In parallel, run infrastructure for this community to provide a shared space for interactive computing
• As a result, the community gains access to infrastructure and workflows that let them do cool things.
• They also grow more sophisticated community structures and leadership, which makes them more likely to be effective in the future.

You'd need funding to cover the time of engineering, service guidance, and community management guidance + cloud costs.

[choldgraf]

I have an issue to track the blog post we wanted to write out of this meeting here:

• [WIP] Blog post: Three questions for our open service 2i2c-org.github.io#104

[aldenc]

cc @AidaMehonic