Discussion: Growing Your Community

Tonight, @gwendiagram will be joined by none other than @rosie, @ministryofmischief and @nufenix for a discussion all about community, growing community and how to get a community of practice started in your organisation.

We’ll use this thread to add questions we don’t get to during the session and any resources that the presenters mention.

If you’d like to continue the conversation from the session, this thread is an excellent place to do that :grin: Share resources and follow up success stories from your learnings here!

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Questions from - @richard_club

If you could create a community on any topic tomorrow, what would it be on?

Business value… How do you convince the business (internally, product and yourself when you own business) that your efforts should be invested in?

What is your elevator pitch to encourage someone to get involved with communities?

If I could read or watch one thing to help me grow my community, what would that be?

How do you identify what topics your community would be interested in?

How do you create a vision for your community?

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Personal finance. It’s something well covered elsewhere, but I’m passionate about it, and that passion is what helps a community begin and thrive.

I question what problems & losses that there would be by not having a community of some time. If you have just one person who knows everything, and there isn’t any motivation to change that, or suitable means to allow them to share their knowledge, then how do you cope if anything happens to them? Give them a way to let people ask questions, share what they know, and work together, and the company & community benefit.

What’s the worst that can happen by being involved? As not being involved means people can miss out on being involved with something greater, that benefits them, their peers, and their company.

A book that has helped me numerous times with setting up & running Communities of Practice is this one by Emily Webber - Building Successful Communities of Practice – Emily Webber

I ran a group activity where everyone in the community wrote a sticky note on a topic they would be interested in either learning about, or sharing. Once all the topics were written out, I placed them on a wall in a line. I then asked everyone to put their name above it if they had knowledge on the topic they would share, and below if they wanted to learn about it. It showed not only what topics were of interest, but also how much interest there is.

I covered this as part of a blog series where I helped set up a Community of Practice, with one of the activities being creating a shared vision - 2019/10/05 Running my first Community of Practice kick-off workshop (Part 1) – The Pirate Tester

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