Parts of the House
The following are the aspects of the operations team that comprise the ProgCode core ecosystem.
Partner Dynamics
At the moment, Rapi drives the partnerships both from the application creators and external networks standpoint.
For app creators, the process starts by reaching out to partners and finding a time to talk. Rapi will usually call for someone to join him in the call so that the joiner will then become the point person who will help out the app creator. The coordinator will be responsible in making sure the ProgCode staff knows what the app creator currently needs. Coordinators have to make sure that they are coming from a place of service.
Member Dynamics
The lifecycle of a progressive coder starts and ends as a lurker. We fully accept that 80% of the community will not be interactive at all, and that 20% of the total population will be doing 80% of the engagement. This is why we have decided not to go about reaching out to the 80% of the lurkers but rather find ways in order for people – lurker or not – to be able to join the community any time they want.
First is the registration process. Dan has created an airtable form that allows us to manage the members that are coming into our website. The registrants will then be vetted and will be invited to the community.
Joe will then welcome them, along with Pamela and Stephen. The newcomers are invited to an onboarding session that will cover the things new members need to know. Afterwards, Joe, Pamela, Stephen, and Preston will take part in the onboarding buddy system, which will help the volunteers to be guided through the community further so that they will be ready to contribute and join a project.
Tools and Other Assets
Dan and Dave have been the two main folks working on much of the tools being used in ProgCode. Many of our tools are centered in AirTable, slack Integration. The main goals of which are to make sense of the chaos that is happening in Slack, provide areas of collaboration outside of Slack, and become a more digestible resource of knowledge about the network. If you wish to help out building tools, please reach out at #operations
We fully embrace the power that slack provides the network. It is the platform for ideation, collaboration, and the initial stake that members put into our community (See Slack Forces). The biggest challenge in having slack as that platform is onboarding and re-onboarding. That's where GitHub shines. We have started putting all the information anyone needs to know to get started in operations and start contributing. The project pages also offer a lot of ways for people to jump in a project and contribute, but at the same time learn the latest news about them.
Content
Rachel Brody has been leading the weekly updates, which we push to the whole network to give them an up-to-date news on what is going on with the network. We push this out in our Medium publication, The Progressive Coder, along with other works contributed by members of the network. If you wish to partner up with Rachel, please reach out at #operations.
Social Media is delegated to all folks who are willing. This is where the push-be-pulled value comes in a lot. The main idea for our social media assets is to engage the public at large into conversation, and make them think about the relationship of tech in the progressive movement, but at the same time push progressive agenda to a technological audience. It is also used to highlight projects within our community and provide a space for them to be amplified. It is not a place to grandstand or megaphone your thoughts. It is not anyone’s megaphones, but it is used to serve the community.
Various channels in slack are used as tools of engagement as well, which allows us to provide information to the public thereon which project would be best to focus on. These various copies of tweets, facebook messages, community call-outs are all situated in our content calendar.