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:
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!
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.
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
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
