Organisers' Guide

Newspeak House is here to support those organising around political technology. We think of community organising as the creation, promotion and management of community channels that allow people to discover each other and share information. For example, you may be organising a regular meetup, managing an open source project, or working to develop relationships between particular institutions.

Newspeak House can support your activity in the following ways:

• Newspeak Hall is available for organisers to use for free. [link to Newspeak Hall]
• The Dean & The Fellows are available for advice & assistance.
• The contents of this (evolving) guide and the community map.

Reflections on Organising

As mentioned above, we think of community organising as the creation, promotion and management of community channels that allow people to discover each other and share information. There are many ways to do this - and many reasons for wanting to do it - people typically arrive with quite a clear idea of what they want to do, and this guide is here to suggest some alternate ways of thinking.

Types of Channels

Here are some examples of things that you might be planning to start:

• A (regular) physical meeting; monthly meetup, annual conference, weekly pubmeet, quarterly book club, hackathon...
• A social media group; facebook group, linkedin group...
• An IM group; whatsapp group, facebook chat group...
• a (regular) (video)conference call; skype call, hangout...
• a collaborative document; hackpad, google doc, wiki, gitbook...
• a chatroom; slack team, IRC Channel...
• a (physical) noticeboard; a blackboard, a kanban board, a pinboard...
• a mailing list
• a hashtag
• a journal
• a subreddit
• a repo

or

• more than one of these, under a single brand

Different channels serve different purposes and will be good for different audiences, and different types of engagement. Each has different expectations of tempo, structure, formality, capacity, moderation and persistence, and will result in different degrees of information transfer, group identity, and individual socialising.

All of these are valid; what's important is that you consider consciously which channels you're choosing to create or not create, and why. Don't replicate channels that already exist, unless you have a clear purpose for doing so.

A good general rule is "go where the people are"; understand your target audience and create a channel that fits within their existing information-consumption habits. It's hard to get people to start using a channel that they're not already familiar with. If a channel is under-used, it tends to repel new users.

Channels may also change over time, e.g. facebook may change the way that people get notifications from groups, or the invention of mobile phones may change the way that people interact at conferences.

As creator, you have the ability to set additional expectations and structure beyond those inherent in the channel. We're very familiar with physical events with different structures; people might take turns presenting to the group as in a conference, or people might self-organise into small groups for discussions, or the event may start with a provocation followed by free mingling. All channels can have artificial structure in a similar way; consciously deciding which channels you present and what structure they have is the primary craft of organising.

Brand

A brand creates expectations around how people should interact with your channels, and what information or people they might discover through it. Often they're associated with a project, or institution, or person, or place. They may or may not have an explicit vision, or goal.

When organising, usually you're not creating a community from scratch, but are creating spaces for existing communities to have conversations that they are not or cannot have elsewhere. If you create a very descriptive brand, then you'll find it easier to attract members from that community; e.g. it's very clear from "Civil Service Designers' Meetup" who the intended audience is.

However, this can have downsides; a clear description may makes the group very discoverable, potentially resulting in low social cohesion; a more opaque brand may be more suitable if you want a more intimate space where people feel comfortable discussing more controversial issues. Similarly, a very descriptive name can make it harder to develop a space that feels inclusive to two different communities at once.

Content

New organisers tend to make the mistake of feeling like they need to create a lot of content to fill their channel, for example programming a lot of speakers at a meetup. They generally they do this because they're afraid of presenting a channel without a lot of content. However, the mark of a good meetup is very little scheduled content - it means the underlying community has a lot to talk about, and plans accordingly.

This doesn't mean that everyone knows each other. A common misconception is that a community is a group of people that all know each other, but in fact it's about common culture. For example, people in the film industry don't all know each other, but they know about The Oscars, Warner Brothers, visiting Los Angeles, life on set, stories of asshole directors and what they did during the writers' strike.

If this isn't true for your meetup, then scheduling good content won't fix it - it probably suggests a branding or promotion problem, rather than a content problem. Rather, the point of the scheduled talks at meetups isn't to exchange information, it's to remind and affirm people of their shared culture. It's saying - don't worry, you can go into detail here and people will understand and value your contribution.

As an organiser, you're not creating something out of nothing; you're helping people who share a culture to find each other. Having said that, you have enormous power to shape conversations and highlight things, and make connections between communities that may not have been expressed before.

More On Channels

Discussions and tips for successfully organising on specific types of channel:

LinkedIn Group

Meetups

etc