Supercharge Your Community!

Empathy is not taught, it’s caught’ - Mary Ross Founder of Roots of Empathy.

About This Workshop

This workshop falls under ‘Building for Action and Impact’ one of our identified building blocks for a Participation Leadership Framework (v.1)

This fast-paced workshop helps community leaders gain empathy for their community, whether they are just starting to grow a contributor base, or evaluating successes and struggles of the existing. A series of activities will help participants define and co-create the first successful steps of a contributor pathway.

Learn / Make / Share

Participants will learn best practices for designing personas and pathways in their communities.

Participants will design their own Personas and Participation Pathways for their project/community.

Participants will share their findings, and collaborate on ideas with others in their group.

Format

This workshop is optimized for a fast-paced hour. However, you can easily increase alotted times and run the same workshop as a half day event.

Audience

Anyone interested in building community, or already working with community who want to better identify Personas and design for their successful participation. Example Audiences:

  • Open Science Project Leader
  • Mozilla Clubs Regional Community Coordinator
  • QA Community Lead
  • Mozilla Indonesia FFSA Lead
  • Community Initiative Lead (i.e.: Community Design)

Materials

Terminology

Persona

Personas are identified contributor-types in the community. We bring them to life by thinking about their needs, wants, struggles and ambitions and refer to them by name when identifying and designing meaningful contribution opportunity. Thinking about who we are designing for, what they want to do, and how we can make them successful generates greater quality of work and a sustained model of Participation.

daphne

Participation Steps

Steps are a way of designing community contribution one experience at a time. What this means is, instead of talking about ‘work or tasks’, we think about opportunities and challenges presented in specific actions for both project and person when they take an action to contribute. For each action we ask ourselves a series of questions to ensure the experience has depth.

Attributes of a step might vary from project to project, but here described here are the minimum considerations.

  • Prerequisite Step
  • Benefit to contributor
  • Benefit to project
  • What needs to be in place
  • How someone knows they are successful
  • Contributor action items
  • Potential next-step

Sample Step

step example

Pathway / Ladder

pathway

Participation pathways (we sometimes call them ladders as well), like actual paths guide someone from a starting point, to the place they want to go, or can potential go.

Pathways always start with an identified entry point, and an end point which represents the potential for sustained participation.

This isn’t to say that there we’re designing with rigidness, but rather being deliberate about the depth of each step as well as the journey.

Multiple Pathways

The potential of using pathways is that you can design more than one, which have the potential to intersect. We will not be covering multiple pathways in this workshop.

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Image Credit : Ian Sane

Persona Activity

Persona Design

Partner participants in pairs based on similarity of interests, background or knowledge. Assuming this is known, otherwise use a round of introductions to bring out themes:

“Hi my name is __ and my community goal is”.

Ask participants to self-organize into pairs based on what resonated with them about someone else’s goal or project.

Note: Let people know the next activities will be timed. People will feel rushed, but that’s OK - this is a creative process, encourage them to surface what feels important, and meaningful, but also to share inklings of ideas, and hunches as well.

Persona Interviews (8 minutes)

The goal of these interviews is to recognize similar personalities, amibitions, motivations and skills between communities - to gain empathy for why people turn up, and where they hope to go. For each of these questions

Format: Partner A will interview Partner B, and have one minute per question. Then Partner B will interview Partner A on the same question. Ask participants to record as many important themes, ideas, and things of interest as they can on sticky notes.

  • Q1 Who is in your community? How would you describe the range of people in your community?
  • Q2 What kind of person do you most need in your community right now, in a year from now?
  • Q3 Imagine: what does that person get excited about, and why? What might they find challenging or discouraging, and why?
  • Q4 Who have you lost or are missing, and why do you think that person left the community?

Build Personas ( 5 minutes )

Ask them to identify one strong Persona emerging from the excercise, using this template. We will use our Persona names moving forward, to help personalize our pathways.

Image Credit: Matthias Ripp

Pathway Activity

In the same pairs, ask participants to answer the following questions using their Persona’s name.

Visualizing Participation Steps ( 10 minutes)

Format: Same as Personas, each question is one minute, sticky notes document hunches, ideas and observations.

  • Q1 Tell the story of how one of your personas came or might come your project?
  • Q2 What is the smallest unit of contribution for this contributor?
  • Q3 How does this contributor know they are successful and where to go next?
  • Q4 How might this contributor help others starting after them?
  • Q5 What barriers might they encounter

Categorize ( 2 minutes )

Ask participants to spend 2 minutes categorizing their findings into groups of sticky notes.

Path Mapping ( 10 minutes )

Ask each pair to map their findings along a pathway or progression by asking these questions together.

How might we bring our persona, as they arrive in our community closer to the potenial of their participation which is ___ ?

Provide partners with step templates, and explain each attribute. Ask them to design one step. If time or enthusiasm allows, hey they can continue but really invest understanding the first step.

  • Prerequiste What should this person know or do before starting this pathway?
  • Value to contributor: What opportunity exists for this person if they complete a step? Examples might be learn a skill, recieve mentorship, perhaps their name will be mentioned in a public post (encourage empathy we’ve built to respond here) ,
  • Value to project: What benefits the project by someone successfully completing this step?
  • What needs to be in place: What needs to be in place for success of this step? This can be anything from mentors, to accounts for people on tools, and even prequisite knowledge.
  • How someone knows they are successful Don’t assume, contributors know - what clarity will be built in to trigger recognition of success.
  • Action Items: What actions does this person need to take within this step? Might be login to Bugzilla, assign a task to themselves, introduce themselves on a forum etc.
    • Next Steps What step comes next, or could come next?

Image Credit: Andreas Levers