People often reach out for help building onboarding & leadership pathways because they want to grow their communities. They may be a solo maintainer eager to find people to help share the load, or a group that wants to expand and diversify.
Pathways are always particular to each project, but the overall approach is the same across projects, and indeed across all of Relational Tech's services. That is, we follow the 5 Cs.
1. Clarify Your Needs. You likely have multiple needs, some of which are clear and some of which are murky. For instance, you may know that you need specific help with a specific task (say designing a new logo, or fixing your broken build process), but only have a vague sense that something's missing in the community. We may use the Visibility Spectrum exercise to help bring overlooked needs to light. It's also important to think about *how* you want people to help. Are you looking for people to share an existing task with you, take it over, or handle an entirely new area of growth?
2. Connect With People Who Can Meet Your Needs. The next step is to begin making connections to people who can meet your needs. There are many approaches we can take, depending on your existing resources, your comfort level, and the kind of help you need. In some cases, there are existing communities of practice in a given domain that you can reach out to. You could also look for people via social media. You can participate in meetups/sprints/hack nights or programs like Outreachy or Google Summer of Code.
3. Communicate Your Needs to Each Other. At this point, you've hopefully done some work to clarify your own needs, and have shared those needs with your new connections. Now it's time to listen to their needs. What are they hoping to get out of the project? What are the barriers standing in their way?
While each individual has different needs, there are some common patterns (in open source projects, and in communities, generally) that we can take advantage of to make life a little easier. For example, most newcomers to open source projects will need social connections to community members and feelings of psychological safety. People also need context about what the project is and how it works. For code contributors, they may need technological context; for people helping with user support, they may need context on known pain points. We can proactively address some of these needs with things like regular social gatherings and context-building tasks.
4. Address Conflicts. Again, conflicts are individual and specific, but there are common patterns we can learn from. For example, one common conflict is between a maintainer's already overstretched time and energy, and a newcomer's need for help. Together, we can brainstorm solutions that will help your specific community, whether that's virtual work parties so people can get help quickly; improved documentation; cohorts of newcomers who can help each other; or something else.
5. Make Commitments. Once you've established good relationships, articulated needs, and worked through some of the more obvious conflicts, it's reasonable to ask for commitments, provided you are willing to make commitments in return. For example, you can say, "I can make time to meet with you one-on-one for the next several months, to teach you all you need to know about X, if you're up for splitting the load of X going forward." The right person will be excited to make this commitment.
Specifically, the 'Onboarding and Leadership Pathways' service includes:
With all of the above steps, my goal is to teach by doing. For your project to succeed long term you will want to continually be bringing in new people, guiding them down the pathway, and updating the pathway to fit everyone's changing needs. So in addition to facilitating and leading the process above, I will also be sharing and teaching, so your community can do this yourself in the future.
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