Community Roles

Here is a proposed design for a set of community roles to support a rich future for the Evolutionary Nexus site. 

A sufficient number of people have to show up to do some critical amount of work in all these functions for the site to succeed. Some people, naturally, may be active in multiple functions.

There are two good ways to incorporate your suggested improvements to this page:

1. edit the page directly to contribute a change to the proposal
2. if you are unsure of how to do that, post your additions as a comment and ask someone to integrate it in the table

To talk about your ideas, questions about the roles,  and/or the reasoning behind the changes you make, please use the Community Roles topic of the Community Facilitation and Roles forum.

Evolutionary Nexus Site Roles

 
Members

Read and create content

Visitors

Read content of blogs and wikis

Co-initiation Team

This role is sometimes referred to as the "owners," which is misleading because a community can be cared for by the founders but not "owned."

Typically, the founding team is responsible for:

• Drafting community agreements, principles, source documents, and manage the process of collaborative updating them

• Making decision about development issues that concern the integrity of the community and its platform, until organs of the community's self-governance take over that role

• Collecting, managing and allocating resources that the community needs for its development

Community Architect

• Develops the initial segmentation of the community's virtual space. Using the available platform features,. s/he designs  and configure special-purpose structures to support various community functions, e.g: document archives, workspaces, polls, online classrooms, etc.

• Makes recommendations regarding the structure of the community and its relation with its fractal-like subcommunities.

• Advises the community on specific issues related to, for example, trade-offs between various technical solutions inn terms of their impact on the community and its members.

• Works with the cybrarians, coaches, facilitators, admins, and others to continually improve harmony of all of functions.

• Conitnually improves site  navigation - creates a menu structure that will minimize  the number of steps a member has to take to reach a desired destination.

Developers/Webmaster

• Respond to bug/feature requests in forums -- first, a human response to let the requester know they have been heard, then doing whatever's needed to put the request into the pending work pool(s).

• Install modules

• Fix bugs

• Write new code

• Interface with Drupal dev community and other dev communities as needed

Admins

• Manipulate site setup parameters including look & feel & other defaults

• Turn features on & off

• Add/delete user IDs

• Escalate to developers as needed

Facilitators

The social host or "host as innkeeper" is the most well-known online facilitation model originating out of long time discussion communities like The Well, Electric Minds and Salon Table Talk. As a dinner host brings together the elements of a successful party, a social host helps create an environment where the members feel comfortable to participate. Part conversationalist, part counselor, part role model and sometimes even part bouncer. They are also usually part of the conversation. (from Nancy's site)

Cybrarians

Cybrarians represent the gift of knowledge and information. They are "topical" experts. Cybrarians help members find information internally and externally of the community. They organize information and make it accessible. And they stimulate interaction with the introduction of or pointer to new and relevant information. (from Nancy's site)

Content Stewards

• Add/delete forums

• Create/move/copy/xref topics and posts as needed to maintain coherenceˆ

•Archive completed requests

Site Coaches

Help novice users learn to work with the site, monitor and respond to requests for help.

The Town Council
The emergence of governance structures in online groups has given rise to roles that approximate those of "mayor" or "town council." Whether elected, appointed or self-appointed, this type of facilitator generally operates based on a set of community rules or norms. Again, the more explicit the norms and expectations, the easier to fill this role.  (from Nancy's site)

Great collection on further resources on community roles and other online facilitation topics at Nancy's  site:

http://www.fullcirc.com/community/communityfacilitation.htm