Growing real-world communities and decentralised organisations
Healthy communities don't just happen by accident, they need to be actively cultivated. Although much of the work in starting a community is just hard and persistent work, there are some simple techniques and processes that can make it a little easier. If your community happens to be a decentralised (teal) organisation, actively trying to achieve something (like profit) many of the same rules apply - they just happen to be even more important.
Getting it together
Peter Brownell has a few decades of experience at creating and growing communities and collaborative organisations. In this talk he will discuss some of his adventures, lessons and mistakes accumulated over years of experimentation. His current experiment is exploring how to decentralise decision making power within a Drupal shop.
Topics will include:
- How to get a community started
- The importance of not being a leader
- Being friendly and keeping things fun
- Decision making processes
- The evils of community grievance processes
- Lunch!
- Burnout
- Roles, responsibilities and trust
- Teal
Years of pain ;-)
Peter has been working on these things for most of his life. He organised the original Drupal meetups in the UK, is a director of one of the UK's oldest Drupal dedicated consultancies, has run an art activist organisation http://spacehijackers.org/), managed a tech meetup for 14 years (http://dorkbotlondon.org/), is a director of a collectively run art studio (http://www.limehousetownhall.co.uk/) and spent many years running a branch of a decentralised public speaking organisation (http://www.cityoflondontoastmasters.org/). He' still has a lot to learn.
The next level
Understanding how to work in decentralised and collaborative ways is a rapidly emerging necessity. The emerging teal organisations (http://www.reinventingorganizations.com/) are one of the best ways that we can adapt to a world undergoing extremely rapid and profound change. Working without centralised hierarchy will soon be an essential skill - but it is one that we need to put effort into learning. This talk also shares some of Peter's practical experience at building teal organisations.