Amplifying communication, empathy and collaboration in your open source development
Through a four-week, personalized pilot program, empower 1-2 [community name] community members and their teams to level-up their contributions and collaboration on at least one priority action item that they identify.
If you’ve got an initiative or goal that you would like to achieve through the [specific technology] community, we’d like to help you by offering you the opportunity to participate in this experimental, four-week pilot. The programming offers you the opportunity to explore and gain insights on these facets of your workflow:
- Effective user research;
- Making collaboration painless;
- Communicating clearly with proposals and documentation;
- Building teaminess
This offering is useful to any individuals or teams who are working on a feature or contribution prioritized by the technical community/project of interest; would like to work on a project but are struggling to get started; or who are generally new to open source development and want to experience it in a fun, fulfilling way.
To volunteer for this experiment, please send an email briefly describing a goal that you and your team wish to achieve through your project participation; any obstacles or struggles you’re facing; how many participants you’ll bring from your side; and what you’re like to gain most from your participation.”
Over four weeks, meet with the participants virtually for four 45-/60-minute retrospective-style sessions.
Before the session, ask the participants how they connect with users to verify hypotheses. Depending on their level of investment, either teach them the basics (focusing on why user research is important) or, if they’re beyond the basics, tricks and tips on how to generate more valuable feedback + integrate it into their development processes.
Before the session, ask the participants about their top 1-2 process-related blockers, and why/how those barriers are inhibiting collaboration. Spend the session helping them to unravel the knots and avoid them in the future.
Review some basic templates (press release, vision doc, README) and have the group draft very simple examples for all three writing formats. Review their work through the end of the session, highlighting wins and areas for improvement.
This session emphasizes trust-building and openness. We’ll focus on identifying team ingredients—different skills and values among the team members that make them stronger together. We’ll also do a review of strengths and internal risk factors that have come up during the previous three weeks and, by the end, create a list of action items to continuously improve.
For groups that have worked for a while, established a history together, and want to improve communication between members + newbies, this kindness under pressure session can be a valuable first step.