A Community Handbook is a living document that contributes to a healthier and more open internet by allowing communities to work in a more transparent, asynchronous way. This is critical to allowing more people from all kinds of backgrounds to begin participating and contributing to communities -- and it’s also good for holding communities accountable. During this discussion, we’ll share examples of community handbooks we’ve helped write, and we’ll discuss best practices for creating community handbooks that help build stronger, more diverse, and open communities. By the end of this discussion we hope to inspire the audience to begin or contribute to their own Community Handbook as well as learn ways to improve our own.
Varying numbers of participants should not be a problem. We plan on having a discussion, a brainstorm with virtual sticky notes, and breakout sessions.
We can adapt to whatever size audience we get by increasing or decreasing the number of people in a given breakout session, and by making our goals clear so that we can keep everyone focused if it's a large group.
Nuritzi has previously facilitated brainstorm sessions, BoFs, workshops, and led onboarding sessions both at work and in communities for more than 30 participants at a time.
We're hoping that many efforts and discussions will continue after Mozfest. Share any ideas you already have for how to continue the work from your session.:CHAOSS (https://chaoss.community/) is developing metrics to measure open source community health. If there’s enough interest, we could begin a working group there around Community Handbooks so that we develop standards for how communities can create inclusive handbooks and measure their success.
Sr. Open Source Program Manager at GitLab
Open Source Research Strategist and Tech Writer at CHAOSS/The Linux Foundation