Hi all,
As I teased a few weeks ago, I am delighted to announce that starting today, we are welcoming members of the GOSH community to get involved in new activity pods launching July 1.
Per the Community Engagement Plan that I drafted following the Community Check-In survey earlier this year, the goal of these pods is to invite community members to contribute to one of three areas - fundraising, documentation, and peer exchange - in dedicated small-cohort, time-bound pods that will run through the end of the year.
Here are the basic details:
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The pods will run simultaneously, one dedicated to fundraising, one to documentation, and one to peer exchange opportunities.
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Pods will run July 1 through mid-December of this year.
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Each pod will identify their own goals and, at the close of their run, outline paths forward for their successor cohorts.
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Each pod will also produce a transition plan to ensure continuity - I am happy to help with this.
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This is a pilot program, so we will learn as we go. It will be imperfect - what we learn will help us adapt for future cohorts/pods.
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Pods will be capped at ten participants each to start, to help keep things manageable. We can open things up as feels appropriate and as we learn what works best.
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Pods are designed to be community-driven and community run. I will support you with templates, workspaces, and other scaffolding, and will also hold regular check-ins throughout the six-month pod period.
If you would like to join a pod, please complete this form by the end of the day on June 20, AOE. If we receive more than ten expressions of interest for any given pod, we will make selections based on equitable representation of backgrounds and length of involvement in the GOSH community. Pod selections will be communicated on Wednesday, June 24.
Background on the Activity Pods
As mentioned, the idea for these pods arose from the Community Check-In survey that we ran earlier this year. If you are interested in what came out of that survey, you are welcome to review the resulting report that I shared with the Community in late March. Among the findings were that community members are eager to get and remain involved, however have varying capacities for doing so.
Areas of expressed interest include the three centered here - fundraising, documentation, and peer exchange. These pods were designed to respond to both findings, creating lightweight, time-bound opportunities for community members to engage in areas they identified as priorities.
If you’re interested to learn more about the larger Community Engagement Plan that was developed in response to the survey, you are welcome to read my initial post about it, and also review the draft that I shared. That draft includes all feedback received to-date - it has been incorporated into a final version here.
Many thanks for reading this far! If you have any questions or comments, please either share them here or contact me directly at jamaica@opensciencehardware.org.