I am writing to share a plan that I have drafted, designed to support some new opportunities for community engagement and leadership. This plan was directly informed by the Community Check-In survey results and related report that I shared earlier this year.
The Community Engagement Plan describes a pilot effort to accomplish two things: 1) provide stronger welcoming and onboarding supports, and 2) launch a series of lightweight, six-month “pods” organized around three areas of interest that stood out from the survey results: fundraising, documentation, and peer exchange.
I plan to open up a call for folks to join these pods in early June. For now, I wanted to share the plan so that everyone has a chance to read and comment on it. As you do so, it may be helpful to keep in mind the framing that shaped this draft:
It is intended as a pilot, running through the end of the year.
I will be responsible for the welcoming and onboarding initiative (and happily welcome your feedback and help, if you are so inclined).
I will also support the activity pods, however they are best envisioned as sandboxes of sorts, in which community members set and work towards their own agendas.
End-of-year reflections will inform subsequent iterations of the pods. Maybe the pods will run again as a second cohort, maybe they’ll evolve into something else, or maybe they will be dissolved. We can figure this out together, based on what we learn.
Thank you for any time you spend reading, considering, and sharing feedback on this plan. It was drafted, reviewed, and refined to reflect your input. I am eager to know where it succeeds, where it can be strengthened, and what we’ve missed.
I really appreciate that you took the time to read through this, and I appreciate the thoughtful comments you’ve left as well! I’ll respond to them in the doc.
Thanks for sharing this, Jamaica. It’s clear a lot of thought went into it, and I appreciate that it was shaped directly by what the community said. The pod structure makes a lot of sense to me, and I like that it’s framed as a pilot with room to evolve. My main question is around running three pods at the same time given a half time position capacity (already working on many things), and whether there’s a plan B if recruitment is slower than hoped. Would love to see some more thinking on that as things get closer to June (summer can be slow in many pockets). Overall though this feels like a real step forward and I’m glad it’s happening. Looking forward to seeing how it unfolds.
Hey JP! Thanks for this thoughtful feedback. I am going to take your questions in reverse order. The short answer to the second is that because this is a pilot, I don’t have a predetermined contingency plan in the event that engagement in the pods is low. A primary goal of this effort is to provide some new opportunities for engagement, but for me it is also an opportunity to learn. If a pod attracts fewer participants than expected, I’ll treat that as useful information and adapt accordingly. I do recognize that the summer start may be a challenge, but I wanted to at least give it a shot, as due to the timing of the Gathering there won’t be another opportunity this year. It may be, depending on what emerges, that we do some redesign and try again in 2027.
I do, of course, appreciate your question about timing and workload. If all goes according to plan, I will have a busy year. The simultaneous pods should be manageable, however, as they are designed to be community-run. My role will be to support through scaffolding, largely, in addition to a small number of check-ins. Overall, my priority for this first implementation is to create a lightweight framework, observe how it is used, gather feedback, and adapt based on what we learn.
Hi @prabhu9484 - thanks for spending some time with this and sharing this suggestion!
At present, the plan for this round is to focus on “internal” engagement opportunities, however it’s always much appreciated to share news of external events as well. I share a list every month in the Newsletter - this month’s will go out on June 1 so the timing won’t be great to share this particular event, however if you wanted to you are welcome to broadcast it more widely via a dedicated post here in the General category.