Want to talk about communities and community building. It was a partial contextual shift as to her place in a number of communities.
Thought a lot about where she fits in. Have had a lot of identities, and thinks of herself as: nerd, geek, wonk, curator, archivist, woman, leader. Originally thought of herself as just another person, but everyone in this room should take on the role of leader.
Everything we do is part of the community, everywhere. Everyone in code4lib is part of a
community that succeeds through relationships.
Take the ethos of code4lib back to each organization.
Software Development
Every software requires a community. Each person is part of it cares. Sustaining software requires a community of people who really care. We need to think about who uses our software. This
community is not just about people who write code,
it’s also about people use the software.
The most important thing is to work with those groups of users.
Communications
These communities are built using communication, inclusiveness, consideration, even more communication, and sense of ownership.
Need to think about users, stakeholders, researchers.
Everyone should read this blog post on backchannel conference talk.
Seen projects fail because they’re shared with the world but no one really takes ownership. Ownership goes both ways. Owning what you release, but also helping other projects be a success. Not everything fails, but it needs a community to thrive.
This is what we’re looking for in our communities and in our projects.
That they thrive.
You want a community that participates, looks out for each other.
What Defines a Successful Community or Project?
Participation. One project was a massive failure because no one participated.
Enthusiasm. Who would even want to fund it?
A sense of pride. ‘I’m part of that, made it happen, succeeded in part because of me.’
Learn from the history and the people who can be your mentors. Look at what you’re doing and what came before. Part of inclusiveness is acknowledging that you’re not the only person who has ever worked on the problem, who can work on the problem.
Adoption. A sign of success is that they’ve take it, use it, and contribute to it.
Now we will discuss.
Q&A Session
This supposedly not shy group, but is actually shy a lot of time.
Do we not think we’re not ‘real’ coders? Have the self imposter syndrome. But actually, she is a coder too.
Why does this community has to self-organize? Actually, awesome that this community has self-organized. Used to think every collection is unique and not doing the same thing, but we’re seeing emergence of communities that are realizing this is not true. For example, linked data community cross-fertilizing regardless of the type of collections they had. We self-organized was a sense of shared problem and shared passion.
No one organization can do it alone. We all need to work on it together.
Two most attributes to fail projects. One person thought it was a good idea, but no one else knew they were working on it. It didn’t succeed because there was no sense of participation, because no one was invited to participate. No one should work alone. We fail because we don’t collaborate.
How do you convince someone that they are a leader? Tell them that they are a success.
How do you adopt something when the leaders are not on board? ‘But everyone else is doing it, dad.’ Adoption by others. It’s really hard to be the first one though, we know.
Data-Driven Documents: Visualizing library data with D3.js
Bret Davidson, North Carolina State University Libraries