chapter7-documenting.md

-# Documentation! Documentation! Documentation!

Maybe it's not clear, documenting is very important even if it is boring.
You have no idea how much it may be powerful to document and allow for these resources to be used from everyone.
You need to leave the environment better compared to before, you are the veteran, the one survived to the war about the new UI and because of your story you need to be the master.
You have to stop making the things worse, before the new logo change or the new motto to be ready, moving on your hobbits to the next fatigue and making everything better.

Probably too much cinematic but I think you got the point, before performing better than what we have now you have to stop things from getting worse.

This book is based on documents that I have written during the years and also this chapter is filled with things gathered in various resources that I have written for my communities and maybe it can be inspirational for you!

How to analyze an activity

This is part of a template I prepared to help in defining activities with the feedback from other volunteers, in an objective way and to be later voted from everyone. It is based on the coaching method as workflow but is quite simple:

• Consider an activity such as organizing an event about privacy and social networks
• What kind of resources do you need? Location, projector, internet, graphic promotional assets
• Did we do something similar in the past? About privacy on traveling. What have we learned from that and what can we replicate?
• Advantage of this activity: doesn't require a lot of technical knowledge
• What is missing in the proposal? An update about the privacy during this year
• What is missing for your audience? To gather a national audience we need local user cases
• Kind of public we can involve? All the ages owning at least a smartphone

This analysis is very important to define the priorities and how to promote the activity itself based on the metrics of the event itself.

How to organize a social campaign

Resources

Every social campaign requires different digital assets to the organizers, here you can find the localization of a guide I wrote few years ago for the PrivacyMonth campaign for Mozilla Italia.

• List of messages to publish on social networks available before starting (already reviewed)
• If they need to be localized, do it 3 weeks prior to the campaign to allow for reviewing time
• Think about some resources to give out in the language you need
  • Avoid paper publications and look for impartial providers like the police
• Usually it's better to share something published from someone else instead of writing a new one
• Resources in English are allowed if:
  • They are technical stuff
  • There aren't resources in your language
  • There is an explanation in your language attached
• Avoid English terms as much you can
• Reference things used in your country to provide a better example
• Remember netiquette
• On Facebook wait 30 minutes for every share
• In the afternoon there is more engagement for what you share online (especially with a photo)
• If you include words like News or Update you can get more engagement
• Graphic assets
  • Provide images only when they are localized
  • Provide posters for offline events
• Talk
  • Provide talks made by the community in Italian in powerpoint to review all together, by using Google Documents it's possible to work together more quickly
  • For the event get always a PDF version to avoid issues
  • Evaluate topics that fit better with the local necessities to use along the main topic
  • Create different levels based on the various knowledge for the audience or speakers

Roles

To create a team you need to specify the various rules to work all together and avoid conflicts and issues.

• Talk
  • A person who can do the talk and later plan a meeting to review it
  • Try to not put strange colors and keep the same graphic style
• Graphics
  • A person or more that can prepare the resources in your language
• Social
  • A person or more than schedule the messages
  • Remember the url shortner
  • Keep track of the statistics from the start to the end
• Event
  • A person to reference to for help on preparing the schedule for the various event organizers
  • This team coordinates with Graphic and Talk

Events

A social campaign can also include live events:

• Posters need to be the same with consistent styles only with different information like location and timing
• Talks should be already available from the community/organizers
• Create a schedule based on the audience that you will have, don't get confused by the campaign

Define the issues on onboarding

• Why people contribute to the project now?
• Why they joined the project?
• Define what are the volunteers interests

With those questions we have different Personas to start discussing and see which ones are missing.

• Categorize the volunteer types
• Define their usual workflow

Next steps:

• What you can do to improve this workflow?
• Which new activities can be interested for them?
• Which activities are missing the participation of new volunteers?
• Which are the broken part of the onboarding? (resources on the website, getting accounts to platforms and so on)

Conclusion

Take this chapter as inspirational for you to start writing documentation about community management but also on other things. Write the most stupid things too but write them, the next one that is going to replace you probably won't know everything.