A Pattern Language: Civic Tech Organizing

Levels

• Communication
  • Big Tent for Social Change
• Goverance
  • Shared Leadership
  • Small, clearly-defined roles
  • Contributors vs Members (Minimum possible division of member classes)
• Leadership
  • Praise
  • Uninvisibilized Labour
• Hacknights
• Projects

  • Onboarding

    • Orientation Presentation
    • Trello Onboarding
    • Single Project Entry Point
    • Self-guided orientation
    • Mozilla Open Leadership Training

  • Weekly Meetings

    • Consistency
    • Voluntary commitments to work

  • Shared task tracking tool

  • Meeting artefacts

    • Meeting Agendas
    • Meeting Notes
    • Updates in Chat

  • Fast and slow lanes for involvement

    • Mailing List
    • A place for realtime conversation
    • Weekly updates
      • Standup bots (Howdy.ai)

  • Finances

  • Seek Sustainability

    • Control of funds
    • Fundraising
      • Recurring donations
      • corporate sponsorship
• Pull Requests
• Code Reviews
• First-timer issues
• CONTRIBUTING.md
• Code of Conduct
• Clarity of tools
• Clarity of access
  • Service access inventory
• Recognize all contributions
  • all-contributors

Resources

• Original: A Pattern Language for Building
• Group Works: A Pattern Language for Group Facilitation
• CivicPatterns: A Pattern Language for Civic Tech [currently broken]
• Civic Patterns GDoc
• civic-tech-patterns: A pattern language for Civic Tech
• Liberating Voices: A Pattern Language for Communication
• Order Custom Game Cards