Improving Community Health: Community Concerns

Well, without writing a book, how about an example:

Years ago as a teenager, I was a in a video-production club. One of our key members was a sweet grandmother. She had the perfect skill set to run a phone tree and scrape up a crew, smooth the ruffled feathers of a host or talent, and was a lot of fun sharing pizza with afterwards. She was rubbish on the equipment - she wasn’t a camera operator or technical director or editor. She didn’t produce, she didn’t manage, she didn’t lead. But she was vital to our successful projects and fun.

In Ubuntu today (it’s changed over time), I currently see two main problems:

  1. Most of the teams that I follow don’t seem to have a clear idea of how they want to do outreach and recruitment, soft-handoff new recruits to a mentor, ensure a positive first experience, help recruits up the skills-chain, provide recognition, and follow-up (attempt to recover or exit-interview) drop-outs. I don’t see those tasks as optional extra work - to me they are essential elements of a healthy team.

  2. I don’t see us recruiting or retaining folks who enjoy doing those teambuilding elements as their primary contribution. For those of us who have already found a way to contribute that we enjoy, less-enjoyable teambuilding tasks are a very-understandable lower priority.

I have seen other clubs, both local and remote, with seemingly-similar problems: Recruiting new participants, meeting goals, holding meetings worth the bother of attending, thanking the folks who do most of the work, and properly saying farewell-for-now to folks who depart.

I have also seen other clubs run very well - I know a book club that people want to join because one member loves to organize it and keep it interesting…she just doesn’t want to pick the book nor use her own house for the club meeting.

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