Contribute/Lifecycle/scaling

Scaling

Definition

Clients have volunteers involved in their project and they'd like to turn up the dial on participation. Teams in this stage, having a few core contributors and many active contributors, are ready to steward their communities through on-going, significant growth.

Learning Phase

Consciously Competent

Core activities

Recruit members, recruit and develop new core contributors and leadership, build relationships with other teams, communicate w/ org frequently about progress.

Measure of Success

Teams have established ways to sustain momentum (mentoring new contributors, developing leadership, etc.) and have demonstrated a 10x increase in active contributors. [I really want something in here about measuring leadership.]

from Jennie: Leadership is distributed, yet strong, with regular meetings and check-ins with various builders and sustainers across the organization.

from David: +1 to distributed leadership. Perhaps the measuring leadership part here is simply that it is possible for a team at this stage to measure how leadership is distributed across the project. This would require that leadership roles are documented somewhere, like the Modules system, instead of not documenting leadership and simply defaulting to leadership based on the internal organizational structure of a team which is the place many projects start. In the sustaining phase, perhaps you could then have a more specific goal about trying to have some sort of balanced measure of leadership spread across paid staff and volunteers?

(This stage is the minimum target for all high leverage partnerships.)

Milestones

• New core members are actively recruited and mentored
• Contributors are given the opportunity to develop and demonstrate their leadership skills
• Community establishes a synergistic relationship with other teams/communities
• There is regular communication with the project about what impact the community is having

Resources

Awaiting your awesome input!

Activator role in this stage

Community manager along with core contributors are responsible for:

• Establishing a visible channel for the community to communicate its work to the organization
• Implementing a plan for recruiting and mentoring new members
• Implementing a plan for identifying and developing new leaders
• Establishing a relationship with one or more outside teams or communities
• Continuing to document community practices, to measure community contribution and to optimize the contribution pathway

CBT Role

Works with community coordinator and core contributors to:

• Help to establish a channel in which community can communicate to the organization
• Consult on plans for recruiting and developing new members
• Consult on plans for recruiting and developing leadership

Risks

• Community coordinator will not be able to bring in new core contributors and leadership prior to running out of resources to sustain community.
• Community coordinator and core contributors will not successfully balance sense of ownership with openness.
• Gaps in the contribution pathway that affect growth will not be identified and/or addressed in order to facilitate sustained growth.

Deliverables/Checklist