Community Management

Owned by Martha Mundas
Last updated: Dec 17, 2023
3 min read

1. Background

As a multi-stakeholder initiative, GovStack is driven and guided by four main partners (International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Estonia, Germany and the Digital Impact Alliance of the United Nations Foundation). Being a diverse group, it is essential to connect the various stakeholders and bring them into closer contact with each other in order to leverage skills and effective working relationships.  

Within GovStack, Community Management refers to the activities and strategies employed to build, nurture, and engage the Technical Community (especially focusing on technical contributors around the working groups) and foster the exchange towards other GovStack workstreams.

2. Objective

The overarching goal of GovStack’s Community Management is to build a strong global GovStack community, maintain the motivation of contributors and improve core communication and a sense of community within the initiative. It also aims to increase the regional diversity and rate of female contributors. Ideally, all of this will ensure long-term cooperation and high-quality results from GovSpecs. 

3. Activities

The activities of the Community Management can be summarised as the following: 

  • CommunityMeet

    • Regular meetings within the GovStack Tech Community (Working Group members, Commit Leads, Triage Leads) will take place online every three months. The Tech Community will have the opportunity to briefly share their updates. There will also be at least one GovStack contribution each time (e.g. country update, CoP update, capacity dev. update) by the responsible team. (--> first online Meet up: February)

    • Once a year, the meeting is held in person as part of an overarching GovStack event (e.g. Country Deep Dive, Roadshow, RTC) or an international conference taking place at the same time. The aim is to continue to get to know the GovStack community in person and create a space for dialogue. In addition, the Tech Community should get an idea of how their theoretical GovSpecs are being received by partners and implemented in practice and what great value they deliver in reality. 

  • CommunityGrowth

    • As a point of contact for new interested contributors who contact GovStack, the Community Manager receives such requests via email/(Jira Ticketing?) and forwards them to the respective Triage Lead, who then takes over further communication and onboarding.  

    • The Community Management outreaches to further potential contributors according to specifc needs

  • CommunityOverview

    • The documentation of current Tech Community members (e.g. who is actively engaged in the WGs, which WG is not working anymore, which is working on a new version etc.) will be kept up to date and constantly improved.

    • The visibility of the Tech Community is being improved (e.g. on the website, LinkedIn etc.)

 

Example Template for LinkedIn Series (biweekly/monthly) presentation of Working Group members: