3.4. Pathway barriers and solutions: Motivational
What might be the barriers to engagement for our personas and how can we address these?
Motivational
There are a three key motivations we’ve identified for why people may wish to join this community:
- “Giving back”, sharing or ethical motivation
- Advancing their own careers and/or skill sets and being a leader
- Creating, directing and shaping
We should consider ways to motivate people into the community and sustain participation by addressing their intrinsic motivation.
1. Sharing
There is value and benefit from attracting community members with any combination of the above motivation, however as we have a specific production goal of creating documentation, it is essential that a sizeable proportion of our community are motivated by sharing. We should consider ways that we can emphasise the importance of sharing, perhaps in the frame of individual benefit through gained through recognition of a contribution.
2. Advancing careers
Participating in the community and our documentation hacks will require people to attend training. We should emphasise that community members will learn new skills through participation, and these will be not only beneficial to their own workflows but also as assets on their CVs. These skills may be technology based, or they may wish to take advantage of opportunities for interpersonal development such as leading a small team.
As this is a young community, early adopters will also be identified as leaders internally at WIN and beyond. We should create opportunities for their contributions to be externally recognised, for example in the WIN newsletter.
3. Creating
There is significant room to shape this community through participation. We should emphasise opportunities to create not only written materials, but also online structure, graphics, events and community governance. New ideas will always be welcome.
Regarding governance, we may wish to consider the explicit governance model of Martha’s Rules.