Grants talk:IdeaLab/Community building body of knowledge

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I think such a guide could be useful. It also seems to lend itself naturally to being developed gradually, on-wiki. A start might be to gather some interested people, brainstorm potential sources and literature, divide "reading tasks" between those interested, and share "digests" of the sources to form a basis for the guide. Asaf Bartov (WMF Grants) talk 23:14, 22 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I guess a question might be, if it lends itself naturally to this, why hasn't that happened so far? Could be a big project to do well, but sounds worth doing. I can imagine AffCom would find it a helpful tool for advising/mentoring folks who approach them. I'd think besides lit review, a project like this might survey or interview folks in the movement about their own community/org experiences, to incorporate lessons learned? Siko (WMF) (talk) 16:13, 26 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I believe a bottleneck has been time and money - books aren't free and finding the right one and reading them needs a significant time investment before it pays any results.
Indeed, I think it could be useful for Affcom, and perhaps even outside Wikimedia (community organising is a topic many organisations could be interested in, e.g. Amnesty, Greenpeace, etc. - and they might even have their own distilled best practices already).
As for interviewing inside the movement, that is definitely a good research avenue. The Chapters Dialogue project might surface some stories, so it might make sense to focus on people who are not reached by that project (e.g. Achal Prabhala, who pulled together the initial set of people for a workshop that the South African chapter could grow out of). –Bence (talk) 17:29, 26 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]