[NEW CHALLENGE] Intentionally shaping community culture

[shaunagm]

Tell us about the governance challenge you're thinking of

Every project/community has its own unique culture. Sometimes it's lovely, sometimes it's terrible. There are steps communities can take to shape culture, but many communities resist for reasons both legitimate and not. It's probably worth thinking more about some of the reasons communities hesitate.

Signs a community/project is experiencing this challenge:

• large or sudden shifts in the membership of the community, including both influx and exodus
• conflict between community members that seems to stem from different values or belief system
• complaints about how the community has changed
• disagreement over what the core goals of the project should be

Note: a lot of these suggestions are focused on goals/values, because it's my personal belief that a lot of project culture is downstream from values and goals. But I am definitely willing to be convinced otherwise!

Potential Resources

• The adoption of a code of conduct is obviously useful for shaping community culture. A lot of projects use fairly generic codes of conducts, which talk about behaviors that should (IMO) be banned from almost all communities, but I think there's value in also having something like Recurse Center's Social Rules which are more specific to each community. Another example: I once helped lead a project called OpenHatch, was explicitly designed to be welcoming to newcomers, and we instituted a rule saying you couldn't say anything negative about specific programming languages. This was primarily designed to stop experts from trash-talking PHP, which was a lot of peoples' first languages. Trash-talking PHP had the side-effect of making newcomers feel unwelcome and not like "real programmers".
• Anecdotally, I've facilitated the creation of 'mission statements'/'values statements' for a few different communities, and found it did a great job of helping communities make their core values explicit. I will write this process up for when this challenge is added to the repo proper.
• Some projects do onboarding interviews and sessions, which can be great for understanding who is joining the community and helping them adapt to the culture. I also think there is a big value in doing exit interviews as well, to see who is opting out, although this can be logistically harder.
• If the community has identified some core values, such as diversity, they could explicitly set goals and track progress along with those goals.