Week Two: Chapter 3 & 4

This chapter focused on the importance of and the ways to ensure that people get together and start interacting with each other. For this a community leader must provide them with Space, prompts and structure. 

Providing space means creating conditions that can lead to people talking and interacting among themselves on their own time. This can be achieved through analyzing where people currently spend their time and what they are engaged by in general. 

Prompts are important ice-breakers because it is difficult and challenging to talk to strangers even if they have similar ideas or thought processes. Having a starting point takes the pressure off and makes it more easy for the people to have natural conversations. 

Structure is important for keeping people engaged once they have begun making use of the community and started showing up. Structure highlights best practics, lays down ground rules and makes sure everyone is supported and safe in the community. Structure includes areas like the purpose of the community, accepted practices, unacceptable practices, paths to report violations of the rules and measures to ensure the rules are indeed enforced. 

Here are my learnings from chapter 4: 

This chapter focused on expanding the community and attracting new people. For this we aim to pull, not push. Hence this would include creating organic interest in our communities by sharing our own personal origin stories with the community/group, sharing why the community is important in the larger order of things and the story of how people can connect/contrubte in a small shared way to the community. This creates a organic pull toward the community from people who are more likely to be interested in the work genuinely. This also works to motivate the existing members by highlighting their effort and impact by giving them the necessary vocabulary to talk about their experience outside the community.