What does a Community Lead (or Organiser) do?

Posted on 28 Mar, 2024

Thoughts on what a community lead/organiser/moderator does (or supposed to). This is a list of things I have found myself doing or have thought about doing.

I am not professionally involved with building & managing communtiies. Writing my thoughts based on trying to manage r/developersIndia. This is an in-progress document of my raw thoughts.

Having said that, I am in no way doing a good job at any of the things mentioned below.

Expecected Responsibilities

1. Making sure all feedback is heard and documented in some form. No need to act on everything but let people share their thoughts.

2. Answer any critical questions about the community. This might be about the community itself or about the community's goals.

3. Make sure that people who want to help as voluteers, get to do so.

4. If possible, regularly sync with other team members to make sure everyone is on the same page. This is necessary to build trust.

5. If possible, stengthen cross-community relationships. I am talking partnerships, collaborations, etc. This usually becomes a part of community growth.

6. Setting out any fires that might come up i.e, disputes, problematic conversations etc.

Things to figure out

Things I am not so sure about & need to figure out. Please reach out if you have any thoughts on these or work in a similar domain.

1. How do you build trust among the team members?

   • In a professional setting this might be straightforward since there's some sort of monetary (getting fired if you dont work with the team) incentive. But what about communities where there's no monetary benefit?

   • Saying "do it for the community" is not enough. People have their own lives and priorities. So what to do?

2. A follow up on above point, how do you build leverage for team members to want to work you? i.e "how to build stake so that people feel FOMO (in a good way) to contribute?".

3. How to deal with in-responsive team members? i.e, people who are not contributing to the community but are still part of the team.

   1. I understanad nobody has to hold the responsibility to contribute. But you are wasting your time by not communicating with other team members. What if something you said (and commit to) could bring a positive change in the community?

4. Diversity & Inclusion

   1. Literally no idea on this, in terms of tech we definitley have the problem of less women representation. How to solve this?

   2. At the moment, I believe that more leaders need to imerge from the women in tech, that can inspire more folks. But how to make that happen?

   3. So far, I have seen separate communities altogether to fix this, which works but I believe its a duct taped solution. Mainstream communities should become more diverse, thats when you will see some real change.

5. The role of a "community manager"

   1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8318199

6. What Good Is ‘Community’ When Someone Else Makes All the Rules?

   1. Seems like the author is yapping about how the meaning of community has changed over time.

7. How much pedantry in community rules is too much?

   1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33175839

8. If a community grows big enough, will it see a downfall?

Resources

• How to motivate and encourage volunteers