The Experience Is the Community

Open source communities don’t grow because people contribute. They grow because contributors help create the next contributors.

This interactive workshop introduces the POPCOM Framework (Participation, Ownership, Purpose, Connection, Opportunity, and Mentorship), a practical approach for understanding how communities create future contributors, organisers, mentors, and leaders.

Who this workshop is for:

• Meetup organizers
• Conference organizers
• Open source maintainers
• Community managers
• Volunteer leaders

Participants will evaluate their own communities, identify areas for improvement, and design concrete change that they can take back and apply.

Each participant walks out with:

• a practical assessment of their own community
• a framework for identifying strengths and gaps
• a concrete experiment to improve participation, retention, and leadership development

The Experience Is the Community is one module in OCL (Open Community Leadership). You can run this workshop yourself. Adapt the timing to your community. Free to use, adapt, and share with attribution.