Why and How we meet
Learnings on Community Building
In the Spring of 2018 a colleague and I were invited to give some collaboration workshops in Cuba for a collective of cultural entrepreneurs. We had a set of clear goals from the organiser, so we designed a three day workshop series (the time we were given) to foster an early-stage collaboration among the entrepreneurs.
The goal of this collective was not only to exchange information, but to really do something together in the mid-term. According to Plastrik et al. (“Connecting to change the world) there are three types of networks in the context of social impact / generative networks:
- connectivity networks — to exchange information among members and learn
- alignment networks — members are aligned towards a common goal and from here create goals and strategies on how to achieve this
- production networks — to foster collaborative action among the members to produce innovative practices, proposals, projects, etc.
In this specific case, the future cultural collective would foster the collaboration among members to help them with the production of their books, movies, music, designs and other actions, not only for their own projects, but collective ones that would help them grow together and spur the creative industry on the island.
To get to the collaboration stage, they would need to start exchanging information and learning from each other while exploring their identity as a collective.
Since we only had three days and we were asked to come out with very specific outcomes, we planned actions that would create a pull effect (I learned this from my super colleague Manel Heredero):
- newsletter: short-term, it fosters the clarification and alignment towards a “minimal common why”
- a common event: mid-term, a lot of collaboration is required, creating belonging and learning through a lot of common experiences
- a co-working space long-term, this was a request from the organiser of these workshops. Being together physically — in a country where you only get to have an internet router if you know how to smuggle it or you’re someone of influence — is of crucial importance. It’s when people spend time together that actions flourish more easily.
On community building and Engineered Communities
It’s relevant to note that this is the example of an engineered community (term from Plastrik’s book again).
Meaning it’s not the community initiators that knew each other already and started something together, neither is it a person or group of people that want to start a community to deal with a certain issue that affects them directly, usually a common challenge.
Our partner was a local film producer wanting to start this community because she shared the same difficulties as other artists in La Havana, but also because she might be able to provide services to this community, like the co-working, trainings, etc.
The principles of community building are generally still quite valid for engineered communities as well; with the warning that you should be much more careful in leaving space for the community members to figure out their “why” together, to leave space for them to do the work, to adapt to the evolution of the network, avoiding top-down as much as possible, etc.
Let’s go through what happened while being on the island:
The date finally arrives, early June 2018, and we’re in La Havana with the group of entrepreneurs. From the beginning we focus a lot on exchange among them: skills, equipment, goals, areas of expertise; anything that could foster interaction. Contentwise, we work on some examples to show how collectives operate, principles of collaboration and how to run a newsletter.
We saw the evolution from the first to the second day: skepticism at the beginning, going through some moments of tension. They would ask: why are we doing this together?, or even why would I want to do anything with anyone else here? And then it evolved to curiosity, excitement, feeling the potential…Don’t think it was linear, it was a back and forth: now it’s great, then we go back to being skeptical and asking “why” again. After group discussions things would look better for a while until doubts would break in again.
By the end of the second day it seemed we hadn’t advanced that much, the participants were processing a lot of information, had met new people and felt we were pushing them towards doing something together. Would we be able to converge to something practical on the last day we had left?
It might look like the base we were trying to build the community on was a bit muddy, not really stable and on a rushed process, but actually, we were following these steps that help us balance the “how” and the “why” we meet:
- An invitation, first framing for the purpose (why): to call the right people to attend the first gathering. This is where the first frame of the purpose (why) is set. Who should attend that could be interested in and contribute to the topic?
- Work on the common experience (how): create bonding from the beginning. All gatherings should embody the purpose that the caller would like the community to strive for. Co-create pull projects to give them chances to work together.
- Readjust (and keep readjusting) both why and how: you start with a hypothesis purpose, after the first(s) gathering(s) you might have new insights for the purpose and how the gathering happens, that come directly from the community, so here are the first adjustments, new invitations, etc.
Let’s dive a bit more into them:
1. The Art of invitation
Whether on or offline, one of the first steps of community building is to invite people to a physical or online gathering.
Inviting as many people as possible is very tempting. We tend to judge the success of gatherings by the number of attendees, but that can be extremely unproductive and doom your efforts already in the beginning.
The best explanation I found on this is by the expert people-gatherer, Priya Parker, in her book the Art of Gathering she highlights the importance to ask two questions and be coherent with the answers:
- What is the purpose of your gathering?
- Who will contribute to getting to the purpose of the gathering?
Everyone that does not contribute to getting closer to the gathering’s purpose should be excluded. She illustrates this through the saying “if everyone is family, no one is family”. “Keeping boundaries for your community, keeps your community relevant”.
This is easier said than done, I’ve made this mistake way too often. An example of it, my colleague Minerva and I started a women network in Barcelona called Despierta (you can read more about my learnings on it here) back in early 2017, during two years we tried several purposes, types of membership, activities…in early 2019 we hit on a topic that could have the purpose we’d been looking for so long: neo-guilds for freelancer women (I borrow the term neo-guilds from my dear colleague Albert Cañigueral). By getting together, members could overcome many of the challenges that come along with freelancing: loneliness, overwhelm with admin, lack of accountability to one’s self…
This was a new chapter for us and I should have treated it as such. Instead, I focused on spreading the word on our event as we usually did (as many platforms as possible): mailing lists, events searcher, meet-up and social media. As a result, most women that came hadn’t been to any of our previous gatherings. This was one of our most successful event in terms of attendance with a nice mix of ages and professions. In spite of this, the fit for what we wanted to launch was low.
A missed opportunity.
Instead of going for quality and investing time in talking to the members we know would fit well and invite a small circle of them, I went for wider reach. And somehow I felt it on the spot. Instead of giving us energy, this event took the little we had left.
You are gathering for a reason, therefore, the place, the invitee list and the design of the gathering should be coherent to the purpose (Priya Parker again).
If you do this well, this will provide a very good frame to kick the community off. The people that will attend will share something in common: their hobby, occupation, political-view, a challenge…anything you want to launch the community on.
But back to La Havana, for our Cuban collective this first step went well: different actors of the cultural scene of La Havana were invited to join the workshop, they were all working already on specific projects related to the arts; those were not people planning to do something, they were doing it already and, therefore, were suffering the challenges of it.
2. Work on providing common experiences
One of the central points of community building is to work on the connection among the members, for this, designing common experiences (that are coherent with the purpose) is key. “How are we going to be together?”
A good framework to go through the common “experience” as a community can be found in the community canvas:
This framework addresses questions like the following:
- When, why and how are you going to meet next time?
- What rituals (repetitive actions, ways of doing, jargon…) will be established as a standard for this community?
- What are the opportunities of contribution open for the community ?
- How do members come in the community? (by invitation only, bring a friend, open…)
- …
Most of these elements should not be completely designed beforehand, only the minimum necessary to get some movement; observe the way in which the community is developing and then establish “rituals” or a “roles” according to what is happening.
Here two main points of our Cuban experience:
a) Informal gatherings to create social bonding
One of the most hopeful insights that we got on the second day of the workshops in La Havana was from the lunch breaks: the participants were happy to have time to exchange freely on any topic without agenda.
That’s actually great feedback and the backbone of any community: social bonding.
A key element to collaboration is trust and this is best built in informal settings than in formal ones. More so in an environment where trust for collaboration is broken among the population like in La Havana (where anyone could have been a spy from the regime).
And this is the first point that we keep fighting for again and again when we work on community building: focus on the social bonding. Community members have to have some bonding with each other to want to do something together. And this takes time.
This point is so obvious that is often forgotten or not put in the foreground.
b) Common actions as situations that create “pull” effect and common experiences:
The purpose we had kicked the gathering off was fostering the cultural scene in Cuba, but it didn’t feel of their own yet. The artists understood it, but this was not covering their immediate needs. The first action they decided to engage in was very practical: skills and equipment exchange, a usual one from community building. Sentences like the following one started becoming more and more frequent: I have equipment for film production, if anyone needs it from this group we can lend it with the lowest fee possible or even lend it for free.
This started to sound like what we wanted to achieve: common lunches and lending of material and skills exchange. They just needed more time to figure out by themselves why they wanted to do this together (with an approach of their own).
But we had very limited time and deliverables as a newsletter and a common event; and these conversations were much more challenging: Why should we do a newsletter together? How could we do a newsletter together if we are so different among us ? Editors, producers, filmmakers, designers and writers. It’s interesting to observe how many insightful conversations a minimum viable agreement for a newsletter could foster.
We planned the newsletter and common event to create pull effect: to coordinate and organise they would have to meet-up, write and call each-other, find simple ways to communicate within a group, etc.
Networks come together through action. It’s a simplification, but a network is made of nodes, the first step is to connect them, the second is to set action through them. That’s when the nodes come together, do the action and this reinforces the bond. If nothing happens, it’s difficult to create real connection in the long-term, why should they meet in the long-term if nothing happens?
3. Readjust and keep readjusting Why and How with the community:
During the first community gathering a frame is given (the invitation) to explain why the potential community members should be interested to meet-up, a hypothesis-purpose let’s say. Does this resonate with the community when the gathering actually takes place? How do they make it their own? In what direction is it really going?
For the artist collective, the motivation might have been to get easier access to filming equipment, knowledge on funding opportunities, a place to meet, get easier access to networks in Europe, being in touch with fellow artists and sharing the joys and challenges of their profession. This is still an infant version of the higher purpose of fostering the cultural scene in Cuba, but it’s clearly contributing to it already.
The readjusting never stops when it comes to community building. New members will bring new experiences, knowledge and ideas for projects. Nothing is set in stone.
In the end of our project in La Havana, we ended the sessions with an agreement on a common newsletter and the collaborative event became the launch of the co-working. In the following months, there were some attempts to the newsletter that brought some further insightful discussions, but the energy of the emerging community ended up around the event and the co-working space for artists. After all, that’s what the initiator of the community (the partner for whom we organised the workshops) had energy for.
Initiators & community stewards play a key-role in the development of the community as well, more on it in in up-coming posts.
My point in this article has been to focus on the balance between how we are together and the why we meet (purpose). I have the impression there is a trend around “purpose everything” and while I will not discuss its importance, because I do think it’s crucial for the long-term, it’s very challenging for incubating communities to find a common purpose right at the start if we’re not talking about a very clear and defined cause or goal. Even if participants keep asking “why”, too much pressure too early in this direction might feel forced. The “how” we are together is just as important, the good shared-experience is what makes us want to go back, meet these people and do something together.
Both go in hand: why and how, these two elements keep influencing and making each other evolve.
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These articles are based on my experiences within Ouishare and the concepts I learn about in topic-related books and other resources.
There’s a lot more to community building, so I hope to keep putting my thoughts together to help me reflect on my learnings and continue the conversation with other people interested in this topic. If you’re one of them e-mail me at alicia@ouishare.net
If you’re interested in the elements that are necessary to build a community (purpose, rituals, value proposition, governance, etc), there are some really great resources out there:
- Community Canvas
- Communities for impact (to be launched soon)
- Book: Connecting to change the world
- Book: The Art of Gathering, Priya Parker
