From interested, to invested to impactful – what’s needed to sustain a movement?

Last Wednesday, I attended the London satellite event for OpenCon, an event that took place in DC earlier in November and which brought together an international group of open advocates to discuss progress to date, and to consider how the movement might be strengthened (See blog posts by Ross Mounce and Jon Tennant for more about the DC event).

There’s certainly been an increasing mention of the importance of community recently (e.g. Cameron Neylon’s Open Access session at the wikimania conference –  and related blog post – as well as Peter Murray Rust’s closing slides on Wednesday). But it was a comment on Wednesday by Joe MacArthur of the Open Access Button that really helped me to frame where it fits. Joe asked, “how do we get from interested to invested to impactful [as a movement]?” Which prompted me to doodle the following:

From interested to invested to impactful – how do we increase momentum in the Open community? Image credit: author’s own.

 

Interested – In order to invite more people to become involved with the open movement, we need to raise awareness of its benefits via case studies, ambassadors, advocacy projects and more. Peter Murray-Rust argues that we need more slogans, better “marketing”. Others have decided to write, and talk about their decisions about where to publish or for which organisations to do peer review. It’s these activities that may persuade others to ask questions and show interest in learning more. And it’s why I believe that it’s important to choose language and actions that are positive, open for deliberation, and don’t simply reinforce an echo chamber.

Invested – Moving from being interested in something to being invested in it requires an emotional commitment, and this where community plays a big part. I’ve spoken often of how a community is a group of people with shared interests, and that when you communicate well with the other people that you’ve come into contact with, you feel like you belong.  Belonging means you’ll go the extra mile to get things done; to work with people you like to strive towards goals that you share. This is where events like OpenCon and the OpenKnowledge Festival are important for strengthening the existing community. They help to form new connections among community members who’ve not yet met, they strengthen friendships among those who already know each other, and they help to convert interested attendees into future, active members.

However, a less rallying cry needs to be underlined here too: Peter Murray-Rust reminded everyone in the conclusion to his talk on Wednesday that the goal of building a community invested in an open future is not to sacrifice martyrs for a cause. Everyone has his/her own commitments, responsibilities and career concerns. And so the amount of caution to show is something that individuals need to make a personal judgment about – not to feel peer pressured into.

Impactful – So what are the next steps to build upon that thriving sense of community? What is needed to make an impact? This is where infrastructure starts to really matter. By infrastructure, I’m referring to things that support the growth of the community and its goals (rather than solutions that tackle the implementation of open methodologies per se). These may include:

i) Clear communication channels – a webpage, wiki, blog, mailing list, online group or whatever solutions work – so that everyone in the open community can find out what’s going on and coordinate new activities in such a way that knowledge of how to do so is shared. If a friend or colleague asked how they could find out more about the open community and get involved, where would you point them so that they could find out more?

Figured out a successful format for a meetup? Share it with the community! Figured out the 10 most common questions people always ask you about Open Access? Create a freely available doc/wiki page that anyone can reuse and put it somewhere easy to find. One of the outputs that came out of Wednesday’s event was the creation of a collaborative open glossary of terms and resources.

This is also why live-streaming (and archiving) of sessions from meetings matters, as well as creating Storifys of tweets of important discussions, or blogging ideas. Remember what it’s like to be the one who can’t make it and be generous with your communications. These records of discussions and events also serve to feed back into the beginning of this three-tier process – to open up the conversations and enable more people to show interest in them.

ii) Specific goals – As a community becomes a bit more structured, then individual members may set some more specific goals. One of the most useful sessions for me at Wednesday’s event was when we worked in small groups to envisage what an Open Access publishing future might look like. It helped us to identify the current economic, technological and social barriers, and to start breaking them down into smaller challenges to address.

Setting goals also provides opportunities to celebrate when they’re reached, or to do some reflecting when they end up being more difficult than anticipated. Without benchmarks, it’s not always easy know whether you’ve made an impact.

iii) Extended reach – Finally, good infrastructure let’s you extend your reach. Got a model for a meetup in the US? Now it can be replicated in Australia or the UK. Ran a campaign in the UK? How about trying something similar in the US? Extended reach once again feeds back to the beginning of this process and helps more people to find out about the open movement.

Big thank you to Joe for the inspirational phrase, and also to Jon Tennant who remixed my doodles into the much prettier diagram shown below.

Interested to invested to impactful – remixed notes Image credit: Jon Tennant.