Ahrashs Blog

We have been trying to decide on a few key skills to experiment with in terms of assessment for the upcoming round of courses for the School of Webcraft. After deliberating with a variety of people, we have settled on “Good at answering people’s questions,” and “Good community builder.” There are other so-called “soft skills” and “hacker’s habits” which are equally fascinating and listed here. These various skills of interest to the web development community are not mutually exclusive, so we’re hopeful that our work on these two initial skills will pave the way for addressing the other skills in short order.

When considering the “Good at answering people’s questions” skill, it was reasonably straightforward to develop some key elements of that skill which are amenable to measurement and nearly universally applicable. For example, it is hard to imagine that clarity, one of the component parts of this skill, is not necessary in any circumstance where answering people’s questions is desirable.

However, in considering the “Good community builder” skill, it quickly became apparent that the component parts that might identify someone as being an excellent community builder are likely to vary depending on the circumstances. For example, someone who is adept at building a virtual community of web developers is likely to exhibit a different suite of behaviors than a person who is adept at building a community of neighborhood activists. Even if we restrict ourselves to the open web-development space, the specific manifestation of “community building skill” will probably depend on the type of project, the stage of project development, and other factors.

At first, this might seem to be a real problem. How can you evaluate whether or not someone is a good community builder if the component parts of being a good community builder are not universal? However, in reality this shouldn’t be an issue. A “community builder,” just like a “business leader,” or “writer,” or “actor,” or any other number of skilled professions and roles, is not a homogeneous category. When a person is identified as an “excellent writer,” the natural follow-up question is, “What kind of writer?” We recognize that excellent writers come in many flavors, even as we recognize that there is some shared expertise among the different categories of writers.

Here are a few quick diagrams to illustrate this point further, one that visualizes the writing analogy, and two focused on community building, where one diagram distinguishes among different activities, and the other diagram distinguishes among different stages of project development, any one (or more) of which might lead someone to be recognized for their community building skills.

Clearly, these are highly stylized diagrams. In reality, the contexts will sometimes overlap a lot, sometimes not at all, and they will vary in their generality to the “community builder” space, meaning that the interior circles will be bigger or smaller depending on the situation.

Regardless, I think the way this makes sense for P2PU is to simply acknowledge that “community building” is a heterogeneous construct, and that we will accommodate that heterogeneity by design. We can do that in a number of ways, including:

• allow people to accumulate certain numbers of sub-skills or behaviors to certain thresholds, at which point they are awarded some level of community-building distinction. For example, if there are 30 different ways that people can exhibit community-building behavior, perhaps mastery of any 10 of those ways garners a “community builder” mark.
• categorize subsets of behaviors into logical groupings according to specific contexts, and then award the “community builder” mark to those people who exhibit every behavior in a category.
• simply ask members of the community who seemed most like a “community builder,” acknowledging that different people and communities may have different reasons for that determination.

There are others as well. The great thing about P2PU in this case is that it is naturally set up to provide correlative evidence of those skills and behaviors that are associated with community building. In other words, if someone is flagged as being a good community builder, we are in a position to study what types of activities that person does in that community which lead people to call him or her a community builder. The possibilities here are nearly endless! You can help frame up some of the ways that we think about community building by visiting the wiki and jumping in.