Community Roles

I’m big on communities both professional and personal. One of the mantras of the “London? Live? Coding??” community is “Do it!”. The lens of “doing it” seemed like a useful one to explore the various roles or postures that enable a strong, positive, creative, engaged, supportive community.

Essential roles

A community member can assume one, several, or none of these roles at any given moment. What roles have I missed?

The instigator (Do it!)

The cheerleader (You can do it!)

The host (Welcome, come do it!)

The worker (I’m doing it!)

The inquisitor (How did you do it?)

The connector (Do it together!)

The documenter (Look how we did it!)

The promoter (Do it with us!)

The planner (How can we do it?)

The improver (How can we do it better?)

The celebrant (You did it! Great job, thank you!)

The teacher (Here’s how I do it!)

The learner (I’m figuring out how to do it!)

The librarian (There are lots of ways to do it)

The mascot (Doing it in human form)

The dreamer/proposer (What if we did this?)

The administrator (We have to do X so we can do Y)

The cleaner (Let’s make space to do something else!)