Hey there,
A while back a kind number of you shared some brilliant ideas related to: What do people do as part of the Ministry of Testing community?
It’s been bubbling away in my head to create a visual and interactive thing (!) to avoid overwhelming people with a big list of things they might do.
Perhaps it’s a handy page on the MoT platform or a slide show or a PDF or whatever. The goal is to provide the community with an easy-to-digest “inspire me” thing.
What do you think of this prototype visual representation of how something might work? Inspire Me: Things To Do With the MoT Community - Google Jamboard
Here’s an example:
I had in mind to label items with the effort it typically requires for someone to do a thing. For sure, this is very loose as something that is a low effort for one person might be a super high effort for another – depending on where they are on their community journey and head space right now. Plus, I think it’s important to call out why someone might bother with doing something, hence the “why” section.
Feel free to add another board and create another “things to do flow” if you’re up for co-creating this together. For sure this could work as just a list of things yet I think the community needs something more than just that. I’m keen to test this assumption!
Thanks for checking it out. Let me know what you think.
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I really like this, I think to try and keep the cognitive load low and make it easier to consume, it could focus on a few themes or topic of actions. Then colour code those in a flow, with some examples you can expand into.
I’ll see if I can add an example of this to the JAM Board
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Maybe something like this?
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Love it, @fullsnacktester. That’s such a simple and engaging representation to get a snapshot of things to do and the reasons why someone might wanna do them.
I’ll let that sink in for a bit and see how I might create a version that implies effort/reward from say, left to right.
I reflect that “Reward” is an interesting one as in its simplest form there’s a reward for the individual and a reward for everyone else (I appreciate it’s not really as binary as that). Tricky to make assumptions about reward – cos sometimes you just don’t know what positive impact something may have. 
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I’m sure with some more graphic design, another layer of communication could be added. Maybe some well placed iconography.
Or smaller boxes inside the big ones.
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I’m thinking there might be a few more iterations we could do.
And some questions to ask you @simon_tomes
What is the main goal of this call to action?
If it is community involvement, actually learning a thing from existing content needs less focus, with more focus on people.
It could be more like:
Find People
- Follow Software Testers on Social
- Follow blogs
- Testing podcasts
Join the conversation
- Attend meet-ups and lean coffee
- Contribute to threads on the club
- Twitter spaces
- Discussion on slack and social
Have your say
- Blog your journey
- Start a thread club, slack or social
- Produce content
Bring it back
- Share content with your team
- Take on a testing challenge together
- Bring a friend from work to a meet up
- Work watch party
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Thanks for sharing more great ideas @fullsnacktester .
I like the focus on people. As my assumption is successful community efforts and opportunities stem from people.
The goal is multiple calls to action – a place for people to seek inspiration. Yet not feel overwhelmed in the process.
Rosie Sherry’s The Things We Do In Community (link behind a paywall) pretty much encapsulates all that we could include – well, we’d make the “things” more MoT Community-specific. It’s an excellent model to seek inspiration from.
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I suspect that “follow”, “join” , “watch” , “share” , “contribute” are a bit like the Netflix subscription model in my mind. Broadcast suffers from being a medium that is at the same time personal, but at the same time a shared experience that links us all. I know I’m always the one who sees things differently, but I was listening to a podcast today all about good technology choices. Before we had Facebook even, predictions were that one day we would have brain implants that feed us information Feed (Anderson novel) - Wikipedia. And so I like to come down to layers, and choices. So I like the way @fullsnacktester has multiple pathways. I’ve hacked 3 out of my cranium as well as it happens.
- Humans innately enjoy novelty, and so any time we seek to drive engagement, we often
have to be doing a novel thing, it’s part of what it is to be human to want to be inspired. A path through the community that lets people who are not “sharers” at all makes sense to anyone who is just “shy”. Why not, have some reward for shy people who remain entirely invisible and only ever giving a like? Their reward, might just be a never ending stream of not cat videos, but of all the up to date industry news and community comment (which actually happens on twitter https://twitter.com/ministryoftest very well to be fair.)
- Actors or “Doers”, want a place to do their thing too, and so a path that for example that gets people hooked into the bloggers club. By for example driving them through a process of learning to write well (engineers are terrible writers) and getting a blog set up. I’m scrolling back and looking at Ben’s diagram now and I’m actually seeing 3 separate people in those striped lozenges. Some people enjoy sharing what they know and go to conferences and see and give talks. For them, that is a big reward. But not everyone is a speaker.
- Learners, people who are not only new to testing, but also people perhaps like me who do not care for the other paths I just described at all. I am an unusual grape, but I’m talking here about a group of people who join only to ask questions and get answers. People who scour the internet and are dismayed at the lack of up to date information out there, and are only in it for solving the technical problem they face today right now. For us getting MOT Pro for example is the reward. Because that’s where the real content lies for us.
I only just opened your brainstorm Simon, https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/uploads/ministryoftesting/original/2X/7/7da4c9bc215701b2b438255c65f90670d4ffb1ed.png and I can also see 3 kinds of why, and 3 kinds of content engagement.
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