{"id":16,"date":"2008-09-03T23:35:39","date_gmt":"2008-09-03T22:35:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/?p=16"},"modified":"2018-04-07T18:28:49","modified_gmt":"2018-04-07T18:28:49","slug":"not-herding-cats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/2008\/09\/not-herding-cats\/","title":{"rendered":"Not herding cats: job design for teams"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\n\t\t\tThis is by way of a sequel (as promised<\/a>) to my last post, getting into more detail about my thoughts on constructing a workable team of lots of people, with particular reference to BiCon.\n\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tI’ve been thinking about this since last year when I first ran into the “Children at BiCon” question, and I wrote much of this article back in May… but it seems like an especially timely subject at the moment, because of the number of people thinking and talking about aspects of volunteering for bi community stuff.<\/p>\n

E.g. at the little bit of BiCon 2008 I was there for, and in the blog comments since, there’s been a striking amount of talk about how “BiCon is made of people”, and celebration of how many people had contributed. BiCon 2008 had the most encouraging page for volunteering at BiCon I’ve ever seen<\/a>. And I’ve already talked over some of the stuff in this article (a few months ago) with Martin who’s head of the 2009 team (who should get some credit for encouraging me to post this, though no blame for any ideas which fall with a dull thud :-) ).\n\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThat’s not to imply that 2009 will be following these suggestions, but it did seem about time to stick my blueprints and thought-experiments out there for general debate and grabbing if wanted.\n\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tBasically I’m going to talk about some ideas for event organisation, which I think would make event teams a more nurturing environment for new talent (and indeed for everyone).\n\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tI don’t mean to say that they’re all my own ideas – some of them have been discussed numerous times in the past in connection with BiCon, and some have already been done. But there are some new ones, as well as some which haven’t yet been fully implemented. And even if they were all old ideas, it can still be useful sometimes to sketch out how lots of different things could potentially go together.\n\t\t<\/p>\n

\t\"the<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a>Background<\/h2>\n

\n\t\t\tFor the non-BiCon-goers, I should explain that BiCon is run by a different team every year. Twenty years ago, the teams were usually drawn from within or near the same town that the event would be held in, but nowadays that’s not necessarily the case. And, more likely than not, nowadays, the nucleus of a BiCon team will include some people who have been on a BiCon team before – though still not always.\n\t\t<\/p>\n

<\/a>Team size and structure<\/h2>\n

\n\t\t\tA major factor in the workability of a team is the structure set up for managing remits and lines of communication. By that, I mean both the theoretical model and the software support. I agree that if we just suddenly had a 30-person team and tried to manage it via one LiveJournal plus email, no-one would ever want to do it again :-)\n\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tBut I don’t necessarily agree (with what seems to be a common view around BiCon over recent years) that having more than 6 to 12 people on a team is inevitably going to resemble the proverbial “herding cats”.\n\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tWhat I want to try to describe is a model whereby i.m.o. a team could have 20 to 40+ members and not<\/em> resemble “herding cats”.\n\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tI can imagine some people reading the description of it and saying things like “That’ll never work – it’s much too complicated”. But its (relative) complexity only needs to be evident to the person or people setting up<\/em> the structure, and to a lesser degree managing it. The people claiming a role<\/em> have a different experience. If it’s done right, their experience is of walking into a clearly defined space and being able to play within it. They don’t have to worry about how that was accomplished or is being maintained.\n\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tWith regard to that initial setup, there’s an element of “it’s easy for me to say”, me being a process geek and happy with complexity :-) But I’m sure I’m not the only person around with these skills and tendencies. And, as I say, they’re not needed from everyone on the team.\n\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tSo, having said that, here are some thoughts I have about how I would operate if I had the necessary influence over a (BiCon or similar) team of volunteers.\n\t\t<\/p>\n

<\/a>Jigsaw<\/h2>\n

\n\t\t\tOne of the metaphors I’m thinking of is of creating a kind of slightly unconventional jigsaw puzzle.\n\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAll the pieces fit together to make a whole, without anyone having a jigsaw piece that’s uncongenial to them or bigger than they want. There’s no presupposition that all the pieces must be the same size. The divisions between pieces might or might not follow past tradition.\n\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThere would be a place in this team for almost anyone who wanted to play, using a partly-hierarchical structure to divide the jigsaw into different areas of responsibility and different degrees of importance.\n\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\tAll the main roles would have apprentice roles alongside, to help develop the “next generation” of activists.\n\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIf I were constructing a BiCon team, I wouldn’t take on other ongoing roles such as venue-hunting or setting prices. I would choose team-mates in the first place whom I could trust to do a good job on those. My role would be something like “People and process manager”.\n\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tInitially, my intention would be on matching roles to people, including a degree of designing roles to suit particular people more exactly.\n\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAs the team got going, my attention would be on whether everyone was fulfilled and happy and had what they needed in terms of resources and cooperation in order to keep up with their timeline.\n\t\t<\/p>\n

<\/a>Not reinventing the wheel<\/h2>\n

\n\t\t\tPart of the jigsaw would be to develop as much as possible the idea (which has already been discussed a few times) of multi-year ongoing role allocations, i.e. those which continue from one event to the next.\n\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tI gather that one of the most-debated-in-the-past ongoing plans is now about to go ahead – a legal entity to hold BiCon money from year to year. I’ll leave that idea to one side here, although it is related.\n\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tSome other areas which could well be owned by an ongoing team or teams include:\n\t\t\t<\/p>\n