Communities Are Made up of People #

For our December meetup, we had chosen two podcast episodes for discussion. Both episodes were from the Open Source Stories podcast.

• Changing communities have changing needs with Andy Piper
• Community health and belonging with Anita Ihuman

While focusing on open source communities and not on building local communities around a career choice, both episodes were very insightful and applicable to our problem at hand: how can we build and sustain a local RSE community at our institutions.

Our discussion went something like this:

“Anita said this and that, which made me think this.”
“Yes, and she also said this. But I think Andy talked about this over here, which somewhat relates.”
“Yes! And that reminds me of this over there.”
…

Suffice to say, it would be useless to try and give you a recount of this. Instead here are a few of our main takeaways.

One of the statements that stuck out to us, was one made by Andy Piper:

A lot of developers, in my experience, just want to write something cool and do something fun, and, “Works on my machine, ship it.” Again, I’m not treating all developers like that, but it is a sense of excitement that you have when you build something new.

We both could very much relate to this statement! Likely, almost every developer feels this to some extent. We get excited about building something new, being creative, architecting something that hasn’t been there before, but this excitement decreases once it basically works, and now we have to polish it and fix the bugs. Building a community is a little bit like this. In the beginning, you might get some people excited when you share your ideas and visions with them, but after the first few meetings, when things slow down and you need to put some structure and processes in place, then it’s harder to get motivated and push forward. Especially when building a community, you often only see what you have accomplished when looking back. Relating this back to our last blog post about the types of people you need to build a community, you first need to find the passionate ones, the ones that will keep pushing even when the excitement ebbs away. Once you have those, you can shift focus to draw others in.

Keeping the members of a community excited is also closely tied to the feeling of belonging, that Anita Ihuman discusses. Which raised the question for us, who do we want to belong to our local RSE communities? There are arguments to be made for both, a very broad community that aims to include anyone just slightly related to RSE work, but also for a more narrowly focused community that concentrates on the needs of RSEs at the institution. This is not necessarily a question that first comes to mind when just trying to find some like-minded people, and it might not be necessary to define this upfront. But as the community grows and develops goals, this is definitely worth thinking about.

This discussion will also help with setting expectations, which is another point we discussed quite a bit. What do we expect from the members in our community? And what do we expect from the different types of members (the passionate ones, the engaged ones, and the lurkers)? How can we encourage our members to contribute according to our expectations? How can we make clear to new (and existing) members what those expectations are? These questions are especially important when considering a point Anita made: that a bad first experience can make someone silently turn away on the spot, and you wouldn’t get the opportunity to ask them why.

Good first (and continuous) experiences, however, require a welcoming community in which people feel seen and comfortable communicating with others. We discussed for a while, how this is a lot harder when you build a virtual community vs. building an in-person one. In a community, in which members are physically located near to each other, you can make a point of stopping by others, have the water-cooler chat, get to know each other and learn about what drives and challenges the other person. You can even go so far as picking someone up to ensure they’ll join a meetup or other event and make them feel welcomed. In a virtual community, many of these strategies fail. It’s easy to drop in and out of meetings, hiding behind turned off cameras and microphones. You can’t just turn to your left and get to know the person next to you unless this is explicitly organized by the meeting moderator. There are approaches to encourage interactions between participants, the easiest being a round of introductions whenever someone new joins (in virtual meetings), or prompt responses and welcome messages on asynchronous communication tools. This also requires that the leaders of a community recognize that these strategies are important for community health. Another point, Anita touches on: “You can only figure out the need to find a solution when you’ve actually seen that that is a problem.”

The two podcast episodes had many other great points and thought-provoking statements. We encourage you to read them and share your thoughts with us on Slack or our next meetup. They definitely gave us some new ideas about how to go about creating a local RSE community, which strategies might help us, and what things we might not have considered yet could be important. So all in all, another very worthwhile hour spent!