Tag Archives: culture

General

Governance Part 4: Creating Intentional Culture

A row of adorable, fuzzy baby ducklings sitting on a log in the edge of a body of water.

This is the fourth blog post in a series about open source project governance, so you should consider pausing and reading the other posts about why governance is important, defining governance, and pathways to leadership before reading this one.

Defining your governance / decision-making processes along with pathways to leadership are key to creating an intentional culture for your project that encourages participation and contributions from others. Having a scope, vision, and values (sometimes called a charter) for your project can help people understand what is / is not in scope for your project to encourage people to work on contributions that are most likely to be accepted and avoid wasting time on contributions that aren’t aligned with the project. This also helps to avoid issues and misunderstandings later by helping align the expectations of all community members. By setting expectations and clearly documenting them, you set the stage for creating a healthy and sustainable project over time.

However, just documenting your governance process and setting expectations in writing isn’t enough. You should also be role modeling good behavior and helping others understand what behavior is appropriate within your project. It’s important to remember that tolerating bad behavior unwittingly sets the expectation that this behavior is acceptable in your project, which can drive new contributors away, so addressing concerns promptly before they can get out of control or become a crisis helps set an intentional culture and improve sustainability of your project. A code of conduct is a good starting point for these conversations, but it’s also important to think about how you plan to approach code of conduct issues and how things like remediation and education can be a first step to help people meet the expectations of your projects, instead of taking an enforcement first approach. 

Unfortunately, some projects eventually run into issues that can’t be resolved via remediation or education, and in these cases, it may be necessary to remove someone from your project. Your governance documents should have a provision for involuntarily removing someone from your project, even if that person is in a top leadership position. I watched a project struggle with bad behavior for months while waiting for a steering committee member’s term to end because they didn’t have a process for removing that person. We always hope that we never need to use the process to remove someone, but you’ll be glad that you put it in place now if you ever need it in the future.

Having your ducks in a row with robust governance documentation that incorporates your code of conduct, charter (or similar statement of mission, scope, and values), and includes clear processes for dealing with conflict can help make your project more sustainable over time. 

Resources:

Photo by Mike’s Birds on Flickr

research

Online Community Culture Research

2 Comments

Yet another great research report coming from Bill Johnston of ForumOne. The topic of his latest report is Online Community Culture. 75 people participated in the study, so the sample size is fairly small, but is what you would expect from a niche survey of people managing online communities.

The study found that the most important factors in establishing and maintaining a community’s culture include:

  • Quality, up-to-date content
  • Clear objective / value statement
  • Strong moderation / facilitation

My past experience managing communities leads me to agree wholeheartedly with the findings that these three factors are critical for having a healthy community culture.

  • Communities without great, relevant content tend to wither away as participants decide to spend their valuable time in communities with higher quality content. The culture gradually disintegrates as key people leave. When I have spent some extra time creating content and encouraging other people to create great content, the community activity levels and culture seemed to show improvement.
  • A clear objective / value statement for the community keeps everyone working toward the same goal. My worst experience managing communities came from an environment where there was disagreement among the top management at the company about the value and objectives for the community. It was impossible to build a community culture without a clear objective / value statement.
  • Strong moderation / facilitation helps keep the community clean and on track. Members don’t want a community full of spam or other worthless content.

I encourage you to read the entire blog post about the Online Community Culture report (or the entire report if you are one of the lucky people with a subscription). The blog contains additional data points, quotes from the survey comments, and a great analysis near the end of the post.

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