Recently we launched the Unleash Your City Campaign, a starting guide for new communities (see this post for more info). Once completed, a community becomes officially recognized (shown by a green checkmark on the page) meaning that it has a good base for building a successful community (in terms of contributors, network coverage and regional awareness).
More and more of communities are now becoming official, and as a result we wanted to extend the guide and provide more help on different fields.
An idea from our side (still in consideration) is to create a feature on the community page that allows communities to choose a goal they can work on (from a list of predefined goals).
Some examples of these goals are:
Organizing a hackathon
Building a local, societal relevant use case that benefits the region
Setting-up a community leadership board that includes an Initiator / Organizer, Tech lead, Communication manager, …
Building a truly diverse team, including at least one startup, university, government and corporate.
…
This would eventually lead to more focused effort and motivate community members to easily scale up the activities.
Since this is a new idea, I’m happy to receive your thoughts / input. Would this add value to the community? What goals would be useful to include?
It may depend a bit on how you would implement it. In general I don’t really like the idea to chase after check marks on a list. It’s somewhat vulnerable to aim at mediocre results just to get as many check marks with the least possible effort. Besides the situation could occur where a certain community could easily excel in on of those goals but instead of keeping that focus their attention get shattered among other possible check marks.
Next to that some objectives may not even be really positive in certain situations. A community with strong corporate ties in an area with a reluctant government might better not even aim at getting that government on board. It may simple be an ineffective use of resources.
But if you will implement it I think possible goals should include specific shared projects with other communities. Like ‘implement hoosjebootje in your community’. Or develop a [insert use case] together with at least 3 other communities.
On the other hand: it would be a way to avoid that communities might keep floating around.
I agree with you @TijnOnlijn that communities should not chase checkmark after checkmark. I gave it some more thoughts:
Starting community highly depend on the work of the initiator which is good, but not sustainable. IMO, what needs to happen to make communities more sustainable and to avoid them from floating around (after they became official):
Define a core team of 3 members (at least), including a tech lead and someone responsible for marketing & communication.
This core team is set for a predetermined amount of time (let’s say 6 months). For this period of time, a plan is created and presented to the community.
After the 6 months, the core team is redefined and a new planning is made.
are there any guidelines or agenda that initiators and collaborators of one community should follow for the unleash/kickoff event?
I have been surfing the forum topics for some info but I could not find anyhting.
My apologies if this post is not in the right topic.
You can also look at the presentation slides for inspiration.
Furthermore, there’s not so much of an agenda for the event. It’s important to get to know the people involved. If you are on Slack, please also join the #Initiators channel to ask about people’s experiences: https://thethingsnetwork.slack.com/messages/C1N10A487/