Community

[gusaus]

After several years of inaction we're refocusing the channel formally known as 'chapters' to be the working group tasked with enabling the community that currently uses, contributes, or could benefit from using Open Collective in the future.

While there's been a uptick in new members and activity in our channel, we need to work through the following before we can function as a cohesive, valuable community group.

Todos

• Determine Mission, Vision, Goals
• Solidify Team (Including roles, commitments, and resource needs)
• Create 'Community' GitHub repo #3
• Create 'Community' collective #6
• Create and document process for paid community contributions #4
• Identify priority projects and programs (below)

Priorities

• Enable community working groups #2
• Create Open Collective Community Guide #1
• Create Open Collective community organizer guide opencollective/opencollective#1996

[gusaus]

I'd like to circle back to fosscontributors/fosscontributors#3 using our list of short-term priorities (see the issue description) as a guide for determining commitments and needs.

• Enable community working groups #2 is an ongoing 'community' activity that will fluctuate depending on team availability and other priorities. This has been my wheelhouse and I'd like to spend 5-20 hrs/wk (depending on available budget) with this focus. Considering @Victorybrown and @Anita-ihuman have shown interest (in community) and are already involved with other working groups (see https://github.com/orgs/communitycontributorgroup/projects/2/views/2) it would be great if they could make an ongoing commitment (specific roles/responsibilities and available budget still TBD). @ShaneCurcuru and @schalkneethling are essentially doing this by being active in several of the channels/working groups. Assuming their availability will be more limited, I'm hoping with our next big priority, we can be more efficient with our time.
• Create Open Collective Community Guide #1 (which I've tried to identify specific sections to prioritize) will be improving and extending Open Collective's documentation. Considering we'd be working alongside the OC documentation team and collaborating in their channel, we could make this a priority of the Documentation working group and identify roles/resources needed to accomplish priority projects and manage the working group in Documentation #9. While we all have shown interest in contributing to specific aspects, this is one of many projects and tasks where a skilled project manager with availability could really help.

[gusaus]

Copying over fosscontributors/fosscontributors#3 (comment) as @schalkneethling's first draft of a mission statement is pretty spot on to what we were on/off drafting in this section of our recently renamed/restructured Open Collective Community Google doc.

Realizing everything is a bit scattered, I'd like to suggest we draft our clear mission, goals, priorities, needs, etc. in that section of Google doc. Would that make sense?

Our mission at the Open Collective community contributor group is to empower open-source projects, maintainers, and communities by providing the resources, support, and mentorship necessary for their success, health, and inclusivity.

As a team made up of volunteers and paid core team members who have firsthand experience with Open Collective, we are uniquely positioned to offer guidance on best practices and help others understand the benefits of this platform.

We strive to foster a welcoming and collaborative environment where new contributors can enhance our existing skills and work alongside us to improve the open-source community. Through the provision of content such as guides and project templates, as well as ongoing support and mentorship, we aim to help other Open Collective hosted open source groups thrive and reach their full potential.

[gusaus]

Copying over @ShaneCurcuru's comments from fosscontributors/fosscontributors#3 (comment) as they are directly related to what we're trying to accomplish in this issue.

I think the first steps are to slightly better define the goals, and create a single homepage somewhere that briefly describes what we hope to become (apparently an OC hosted community) and what we want to do (provide content and support/ideas/mentoring to other OC hosted open source groups).
Then to get enough people to show up here to say "I can volunteer for X amount of Y kind of thing", or to say "I can do X once we get a paid OC host thing going".

I can volunteer a small amount of time for community bootstrapping, and hope to later volunteer time at building truly re-usable content for open-source related communities. My interest is both in content/guides/etc. that help any FOSS community, and also finding ways to encourage and show FOSS communities why they might want to come to OC. This is part of the larger sustainability movement I'm trying to help define and grow.

I'll also copy over my reply in fosscontributors/fosscontributors#3 (comment) as it should provide some additional context around the dynamic that makes this community unique (in terms of benefits/incentives for contributors).

The collective is important since it's why the company and community exists.

Most people here (aside from the relatively small Open Collective team) are users/customers with collectives. The majority are small 1-2 person open source projects with similar needs (contributors and funds).

There are outliers like Sustain (#sustainoss, #sustain-links) which consists of folks from Open Collective, OSPOs and other orgs/groups focusing on sustaining open source. It was through that group (specifically this Sustain Together google doc) where I connected to @Anita-ihuman and @Victorybrown after realizing we had several similar interests, goals, and ideas!

But for the most part, these groups are siloed because Open Collective has little capacity beyond serving their customers and sustaining their platform team.

This leaves a need/opportunity for us to enable community working groups! #2

[gusaus]

Copying over this Slack post from @ShaneCurcuru and my threaded responses for further discussion. Considering our main priority is to define the mission/goals/needs for this one particular group, I'm hoping we can unify our visions in one of the related google docs. I'd actually recommend we consolidate additional info in this issue and draft #1 (comment) into this particular doc/section of the Working Groups doc.

I’ve been trying to internalize a better mission description for this potential “Community” collective. First off, it needs a more descriptive/interesting name, although I don’t have an idea for that yet.

Without repeating the in-depth parts of parallel discussions, I think what you're describing is close to the mission/goals/priorities/roles we're in the process of drafting.

I think the naming should describe what it is - Open Collective Community - with the GitHub repo #3, collective #6, and website occupying the most obvious/descriptive namespace "community".

But it kinda feels like this new collective would be the “DevRel that helps OCF/OSC understand the holistic needs of their open source software related collectives, and enable the communities to have a more cohesive voice”. Obviously this is much more than strict DevRel (about apis, services, software), and more about “community norms, help with project organization, governance, and holistic project management as a collective”, but I think the DevRel concept is pretty close for folks with a FOSS background. You could call it “Community Ambassadors”, who try to help represent both the org to customers (the collectives), and the collectives to the org overall (with a touch of community ombudsman thrown in, possibly)

In terms of the mission/goals/priorities. Each working group #2 will have their own.

The community working group is intended to be more of an enabler of the entire community and ecosystem (including providing tools and resources to other working groups).

Contributing to the open collective platform and other open source projects in the ecosystem would be centered in #opensource and coordinated by the OSC Working Group.

There are also Sustain Working Groups that we could help enable by associating each with a channel (many already exist) and better tools to organize and sustain.

Primary Categories on https://discover.opencollective.com/ could be converted to working groups by providing a channel, collective (project or standalone), and better tools to organize.

For example - if we ended up teaming up with @xdamman to refresh and revive https://opencollective.com/community

We could set up 'projects' for Working Groups we've been drafting on this Google Doc. We could extend that to include categories ('Climate, Mutual Aid, Education, Civic Tech, Arts & Culture, etc), and even Regions 🎉