Hi! You probably have heard about our collaboration with Jono Bacon. This post is to keep you updated on the engagement and the work coming out of it.
In short - Jono is a stellar community builder, and he’ll be sharing his wisdom on how Status can better engage, collaborate with, and serve, the community of contributors around it.
So far, the engagement is in its ~4th week, and is primarily in the discovery & high-level goal setting phase. There are short weekly calls all together (Jono/Carl/Jarrad/Jonny/People Ops), and Jono has also been reaching out to various core contributors to find out more about Status and how things work.
Weekly meeting notes will be updated here if you want to follow along, and updates will be added to this thread from time to time. Shout if any questions, comments, or if you’re keen to get involved!
No meeting since the last, but plan is to check in again later this week.
What we’ve been working on - Jono has drawn up a doc with high level objectives.The idea is to discuss these tentative objectives with a view to fine tuning them eventually into a strategy (i.e. they’re not yet set in stone). Broadly:
Target personas are devs building Dapps with Embark, and a wider tech audience.
High-level proposed focus areas are:
Optimise the Embark developer experience
Optimise community communication channels
Have a content, social, and events calendar (for dev awareness)
Build dev community growth and participation
Consolidate project branding.
Shout if you want to know more, or if you have any questions. Cheers, c
Hey @alexcg1! Not much to report - we’ve had a couple of weeks’ hiatus due to availability. We’re back on for a call this week though (today in fact!)
The last call (Oct 10th) was mainly about:
Agreeing on Discuss (our implementation of Discourse) as the centre of comms with the community - good for Q&A, async collab, searchability, international accessibility
Agreeing on Discord as the the hangout spot for synchronous chat and community meetings. Talked about making community meetings chat based as it’s been difficult to schedule synchronous voice hangouts (chat meetings = there’s a log for people to easily catch up on)
*** Side note - full marks for anyone that can talk about Discord, Discuss, & Discourse without confusing the terms *
Using Discord instead of Status could be viewed as a weird choice - we should have a good reason for doing it and understand the trade-offs. Eventual aim will be to migrate back to Status > could lose some of the community when migrating back
To track or not to track developers through the onramp so that we can get feedback to help build a more smooth onboarding? Privacy concerns about doing this > led to the Community Governance call this week on Fathom as a good compromise.
Is this bc Status is still in development and not yet mature enough? Or because it’s a different kind of platform (messaging vs deeper discussion ala Discourse)? Having dealt with user groups on messaging apps like WeChat and Telegram before, I find Discourse a lot better for async comms and deeper discussion.
Hey @alexcg1! Bit of both - Status desktop still misses some of the features we found were useful for engagement (e.g. sharing pics, emoji reactions) and also we were looking for a tool that allowed more for collaboration over pure instant messaging (e.g. with @ mentions, knowing if someone is online or not, etc.)
Latest catch up with Jono was yesterday - we talked project management. Jono is going to put together a list of granular action items as next steps, we’re (Status) going to finding owners for each of the tasks and figure out timeframes based on how best it fits around existing commitments. The work will probably be tracked in Wrike (our existing choice of PM tool).
Last call was 31 Oct and we looked through a tentative task list and threw around some ideas on who would be the right person to be accountable each task. I’ll ping each person individually and see if they’re keen to get involved and have bandwidth. As well as an owner, each tasks will have additional people involved and /or notified.
As well as finding owners for each task, we also need to suggest when we think they’ll be reasonable to complete.
Yesterday we had a productive call to make the most of the last few months of the engagement with Jono. We agreed to get focused on (a) how to resource the plan that’s been put in place, (b) team training, and ( c) how to deliver some elements of the plan.
Holding a three hour session to deep dive on (a) resourcing, (b) training plans, and ( c) discussing specific elements of the strategy, such as social media.
Reviewing whether there is a hiring need on the community side or whether we can execute on the plan with the existing team.
Scheduling in an education session each week for the remainder of the engagement, where Jono can help train all CCs that are interested in joining (everyone welcome). These 45 minute sessions would be designed to touch on practical elements of delivering a community strategy.
Training topics?
Let us know if there are any topics you would like to dive deeper into during the remainder of the time we have with Jono (end of Jan) and he will get the training sessions prepared (e.g. social media strategy, content plans, community engagement, Discourse usage, metrics etc.)
As mentioned in the last update, we’re going to schedule weekly training sessions with Jono Bacon <> anyone at Status that wants to come along and learn about community building. You’ll soon get an invite in your calendar from Jono. You can expect the sessions to touch on the following topics:
Developing community building skills - top tips for what all core contributors can do to help Status build its community
Community inclusion and engagement - making community members feel part of the team
Creating content for the community - what kind of content and on what platforms & how to use social media to engage community
Community benefits - why having a community around Status is beneficial, what benefits we offer the community
Metrics - how to measure growth
Communication & collaboration - best practices for using Discourse & Discord/Status to connect with community.
Beyond that, you can check in on the latest on the engagement in the notes. There’s a deep dive session planned on 16 Dec to work implementation. Anyone welcome, shout if you want to get involved!
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