Developing community in the ReOps Community: Introducing ReOps Pair Connect

For many of us on the affectionately named “Cheese Board” of the ResearchOps Community part of our passion (beyond ResearchOps itself) is to grow and maintain a thriving community. As the ReOps Community has grown in size and passed the 2000 mark the Board wondered if some members were finding it harder to take part. Informal sleuthing uncovered that for some:

• The pace of Slack conversations felt overwhelming
• They didn’t feel as though they had anything of value to contribute

They wanted to be part of the community, and appreciated what they were learning, but Slack wasn’t proving the right medium for them.

We began looking for new ways to help people connect and feel meaningfully involved with the community and were inspired by corporate lunchmeet programs and UX Mastery’s Slack mentoring program. We decided to run a trial of a random pairing program, Donut, which offers its basic functionality free (an important consideration for us as a free community). Our premise was simple, those who were interested would join the specified Slack channel and be randomly paired every two weeks for a 30 minute virtual meet and greet. We did not account for time zone, skills, or interests and we decided this was specifically not a mentorship program, just a chance to meet and share with others in the ReOps Community.

A few months later, while we’ve had a few hiccoughs, the program has been a success with five rounds of pairings completed. We’ve seen the “Donut” Slack channel come alive with people sharing what they and their matches chatted about. A few fortuitous matches have even happened in person. Topics have been wide ranging; a brief sampling:

• The silly but still relevant one: “What’s your favorite donut?”
• The standard: “What was your path to user research and researchOps?”
• The nitty gritty ReOps challenges: “What has your experience been setting up a participant panel or research repository?”

Of course, we did find problems as well. Not surprisingly, not accounting for time zones did result in challenges for some pairs. Others had partners who didn’t follow through on having a call. Thankfully, members of the community jumped in to take part in additional calls when these problems arose.

Being researchers, we ran a survey at the end of our pilot to identify what was working and what changes needed to be made. Based upon the results we made some changes and selected an official name:

• The program became officially known as ReOps Pair Connect
• Cycle duration was lengthened to 4 weeks
• Instituted a new no-show policy: after being reported three times that person would be removed from the channel (channel only, not community)
• Decided to keep the policy of not accounting for time zones. Our members overwhelmingly preferred the opportunity to meet with people around the world despite the challenges

The ReOps Pair Connect program is open to anyone in the ResearchOps Community to join. If you’re already a member and interested, please join the reops_pair_connect channel. If you’re not a member join the ReOps Community waitlist.

Looking to institute a pairing program in your own community? Reach out, we’re happy to answer questions about our experiences.

Rebecca, Tomomi, and the ReOps Community Board