Create and Nominate for More-Formal Roles

[davidbhayes]

Here's my very first-pass attempt to list all the needs we regularly have, or should have.

Lead/Captain/Chair(s)

Ideally more than one person is "in charge". "In charge" doesn't mean they make all the decisions, but they solidify and act on decisions, and answer for the direction of the group to internal and external stakeholders.

Meeting-Leads

These people need two things: the ability to let everyone into a meeting space (currently: Cohere) and a willingness to lead a meeting. This team likely includes the overall Lead(s), but would ideally have at least one more person.

Teams

Project Leadership (Management) - watch projects, maintain issues and documentation, push things forward

• (per project) Holder of Visions and Tasks

Project Builders - Designers, developers, etc who make the actual projects happen

• Individual Contributor
• Mentor
• Mentee

Marketing - to volunteers, to community (for projects, for money), on social media, on our site

• Recruiting Volunteers
• Recruiting projects
• Recruiting money/sponsors
• Maintaining relationships with volunteers
• Coordinating and running events

Finance and governance

• these people would administer the 501c3, if we had one, control its money, and make sure it's compliant with laws. In our current structure, they're liaisons to CFA and/or LaunchNoCo.

[davidbhayes]

It would be amazing to have someone write a monthly blog post, and deliver it to the Meetup email system as one of those too

[davidbhayes]

I had the idea that "Subject Matter Expert" lists would be useful. Something where people identify that they are either qualified experts in a topic, or that they would like to be one. So we could have a flexible/informal "WordPress" "Python" "Technology Choice" etc teams. This way when you have an issue, you can call on the team and access relevant expertise there without needing to go through the whole org at once, or have pre-exisiting expertise about who has which capabilities.

A concern that comes to mind about this for me is that such lists might quickly get out-dated or over-full of people who aren't interested and able to help (any longer, because life). I think that being clear about "This means that you'll respond within five days via your preferred method of communication, and signals a commitment to do that for the organization until ____" could work. I suppose standardizing further that we're keeping these as Slack teams you join and which receive @channel announcements for requests could also help.

[davidbhayes]

Term limits or seat limits may be a good idea. I like it, although I don't want to give up power :P

But I think rotating people into Captain roles would be good to spread responsibility, decrease burn-out, and generally get more people familiar with more roles.

[davidbhayes]

Quotas: I also think we should have targets for people in roles: I generally feel like we should have:

• 2 or 3 Captains
• 5-10 Meeting leaders
• Project leaders and builders should probably be per-project, maximizing on 2 internal and 1 external project leaders.

[davidbhayes]

Requirements: I think that it makes sense to have some kind of activity requirement for project-leaders, meeting-leads, and captains. I don't think physical presence needs to be expected, but certainly some kind of "being in touch" would be expected. If your co-captains, team-members, etc don't feel like you're responsive you're not doing the job well enough to maintain the title.

[davidbhayes]

From an email conversation with Angel, we need to limit the people with access to Cohere to 5. Which basically means to me that the ideal number of meeting-leaders is 5.