Brainstorming: community subteam

[aturon]

As part of the original discussion on subteams, we alluded to the possibility of a “community” subteam, and this idea has been recently re-raised in a couple other threads:

Diversity on the governance teams

I think that one of the other suggestions in this thread, creating a dedicated community building team, would be a good one. From what I’ve seen, the community building effort so far has been focused on providing forums, like IRC, Discourse, the technical governance of the project, and promotional materials shared on various social media like Twitter and news aggregators like Reddit and Hacker News. Other community building efforts have been local and organic, but not particularly tied to the core project. Right now, there is no part of the governance structure dedicated to supporting outreach efforts, teaching, meetups, and the like. I think that maybe adding a community subteam would help indicate that this is an important area of focus, and give a chance for those efforts to feel like an integral part of the project rather than separate, isolated, local efforts.

Diversity on the governance teams

Form a community subteam, as many have suggested. Such a team has been in mind since we first discussed subteams, but we had intended to wait until the initial teams were fully running before bringing more online. We should fast-track the discussion of this team, and consider an explicit element of its charter to be leading the effort, and making policy decisions, related to diversity within the Rust community. That is, while diversity is a problem all of us should be aware of and working on, this team would be tasked in part with leading our efforts, including raising awareness within our community.

Ideally, this team would be led by a member of the groups we wish to better serve – which would mean inclusion on the core team as well – but as @mbrubeck and others have said, we need to do this in a way that doesn’t ask people to “do disproportionate or unpaid work to fix problems they didn’t create”. In any case, the first step is to get the ball rolling on the creation of the team itself.

Should Rust have an art/design team?

With the unveiling of the new Rust governance structure and subteams, I was wondering if there was any interest in a design/art/propaganda subteam. I imagine such a team would be responsible for the Rust logo and other design assets, the look and feel of the various Rust web properties, and would provide assistance producing other Rust resources–sample tech talk slides, language cheat sheets, and the like.

Should Rust have an art/design team?

Making design fall under the community team umbrella (once it exists) makes a lot of sense to me, at least at the current size of the project. I imagine much of the material that designers would be working with/trying to make pretty would be generated by the community team!

I’d like this thread to serve as a focused place to discuss the possible charter for a community subteam. Of course, community is everyone’s job, but as with the other subteams, the point is to have explicit leadership and decision makers. Some possible areas of focus might be:

• Playing a leadership role in inclusiveness/diversity for Rust. That might include developing project policies, helping kick off outreach efforts, and raising awareness of problems, among other things.

• Coordinating and collecting useful information for local events. That might include accumulated wisdom, a joint calendar (which we already have), maintaining information about local efforts happening around the world, and so on.

• Creating and maintaining re-usable training materials. That might include slides, videos, and other artifacts from tutorials.

• Outreach. That might include talking to organizations devoted to underrepresented groups, as well as finding venues not traditionally oriented toward systems programming.

• Artwork and design. That might include community artifacts like @aldeka’s Rustacean and other graphic designs, as well as establishing a uniform, official “design language” for community-owned materials (web site, documentation, advertisements, etc.)

• Ombuds. We may want to have a place people can go when they feel wronged by the Rust community in some way. On the other hand, the moderation team may already have sufficient coverage here.

Those are just some starting ideas, but I’m sure there are things I’m missing. Please help brainstorm further roles this team could play!

[aturon]

Ah, another bullet I forgot:

• Coordination with production and commercial users of Rust. This might include setting up regular meetings/town halls or other ways for production users to talk to each other, and to get the ear of the core team for setting priorities etc.

[eminence]

Coordinating and collecting useful information for local events. That might include accumulated wisdom, a joint calendar (which we already have), maintaining information about local efforts happening around the world, and so on.

What about some type of map? Where people can choose to associate themselves with a city. This might be useful for organizers of meetups (“Hey, I see there are 35 other rust users in my city, let me try to plan something!”)

It also might be neat to see in a visual form the global reach of rust

[aturon]

That sounds awesome! I know that I saw a contributor map fly by at some point, but having something more permanent, and focused on meetups etc, would be great.

[Manishearth]

I (as a member of the mod team, but speaking for myself) am okay with both options for the ombudsperson position; or we could have a mixture of people, from both teams, act as ombuds. It sounds like a really good idea to have an explicit place for people to go to.

As mentioned before, I’m assuming that a team with such diverse responsibility will not require each member to be interested in all aspects.

We can also put control of material like TWiR (also blog.r-l.o?) and the twitter bot in the hands of this team. This doesn’t mean that we change the way things work now, but they can decide a direction for these along with the core team. (Also deciding new venues like this)

[nikomatsakis]

I’m quite excited about the idea of working on training materials. This seems related to documentation but somewhat distinct. At minimum just collecting the materials people have used would be great, we can probably work on unifying them over time.

[wycats]

Ombuds. We may want to have a place people can go when they feel wronged by the Rust community in some way. On the other hand, the moderation team may already have sufficient coverage here

I definitely feel like ombuds is a responsibility of the moderation team, which will hopefully have the composition and credibility to be a place someone can report sensitive issues to privately.

I see the moderation team as serving somewhat of the role that the Public Editor serves at the New York Times: committed to the success of the enterprise, but sufficiently independent that people feel good about reporting problems to them.

[wycats]

What about some type of map? Where people can choose to associate themselves with a city. This might be useful for organizers of meetups (“Hey, I see there are 35 other rust users in my city, let me try to plan something!”)

It also might be neat to see in a visual form the global reach of rust

In Ember, we had a community-run effort to build something like this: http://emberjs.com/community/meetups/

One of the nice things about this is that meetups get added to a single data file, and people submit pull requests to add their local group. We reach out to meetups to get them to provide the information (or do it ourselves), has a whole page dedicated to meetup assets, and even have a program for people to commission custom versions of the logo for their meetup.

This has been a lot of fun, and we now have versions of the logo customized for tons of locales, designed by the local community.

All of which is to say: there’s a lot of cool, creative stuff a community team can do to help build local communities and give them a sense of belonging to a global community of Rust users.

Coordinating and collecting useful information for local events. That might include accumulated wisdom, a joint calendar (which we already have), maintaining information about local efforts happening around the world, and so on.

One thing to avoid is trying to replace the functionality of apps like meetups.com, which naturally get kept up to date as an artifact of running a meetup, with a central directory of information. Maintaining links to the canonical source of location, especially in combination with a nice map visualization, is great.

[skade]

That sounds awesome! I know that I saw a contributor map fly by at some point, but having something more permanent, and focused on meetups etc, would be great.

When people use Meetup:

http://rust.meetup.com

I consider them rather gimmicky, though.

[aturon]

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