What is it?
I recently started a Data Science Community Builder Slack Group to connect with other community organizers.
This month, we met informally as a group to share a bit about the communities we’re part of or the ones we’d like to start, learn from our community-builder peers, and just meet each other.
All are welcome to join in the discussion, if interested! We’d love meet monthly moving forward.
A few notes from our first call:
What we’d like to get out of the group:
- To learn from other community organizers about what’s working well for them
- An opportunity to run ideas by people because we may not have people to do this with at our current companies
Topics to dive deeper into:
- How can we help people become more comfortable speaking at community events? (+3!)
- How do we increase the enthusiasm for our groups?
- How do we decrease the barrier to entry to speaking?
- What mediums are most helpful for engagement?
- Data science leaders have imposter syndrome as well - can we lean into that to help others?
- Potential formats for community events: office hours, presentations, structure vs open-ended?
A few tips/ideas shared:
- Let people know why you think what they have to share will be valuable
- Have varied topics: some people may be more comfortable speaking on presenting to executives than neural networks for example
- Everybody thinks they don’t have something important to share until they share it and get response from the community - it’s important to seed your initial group who will help cheer people on
- People love to see when they have helped someone, let’s celebrate this at our community groups
- When something is built as a conversation or discussion rather than presentation, the pressure eases a bit
Random ideas/brainstorming:
- Could we offer a public speaking workshop to data science communities? (Articulation is the company Posit used for the conference)
- Maybe highlight a 5-10 minute show & tell of a lesson learned in community building at a monthly coffee hour then open discussion
If you are currently a community organizer or hoping to become one, we’d love to join forces to learn and help each other. If you’re interested in joining a future RStudio community-builder Slack group, let me know here.