Bootstrap Your Community

TinyURL: http://tinyurl.com/2bs22f

This is a Bootstrap Network Service offered as part of Bootstrap Services.

What Makes a Vibrant Community?

Communities are organic and dynamic. Effective community development is like gardening with a complex set of relationships between the individual components.

1. It’s about something (Maven). A vibrant community carves out a knowledge niche for itself and continually deepens and challenges its understanding of its chosen niche.
2. Its members are connected - (Relater). A vibrant community actively nurtures the number AND quality of connections among its members. It moves from a "broadcast" mindset, with members interacting primarily with the central organization, to a Metcalfe and Reed mindset.
3. It takes action - (Evangelist) and evangelizes its knowledge niche. Vibrant communities find ways to take collective action, both within and without their communities. Every community will have unique actions it can take. Additionally, a vibrant community supports its members in taking individual and joint actions.
4. It creates and communicates protocols. Protocols help members understand appropriate (and more importantly, inappropriate) interactions within the community. They also provide for varying levels of engagement with the community and clear ways to escalate and deescalate involvement.
5. It uses systems to support its activities. Generally, we can think of systems as technologies which achieve a particular purpose.
6. It bootstraps itself. The first 5 principles are applied in context, evolving in a step-wise fashion and impacting each other in nonlinear and unexpected ways. Communities go through analogous stages of development to ventures - Ideation, Valley of Death, Growth and Rebootstrap - and right actions are needed for each stage. Indeed, different parts of a community will be in different stages. Additionally, vibrant communities continually rebootstrap themselves and build in ways to create innovation, while scaling initiatives that have been proven to work.

Hear a talk on the six principles on the BootRap Podcast.

How Does Bootstrap Use the 6 Principles?

1. Create an ongoing dialogue about bootstrapping through speakers, podcasts, book club, wiki. The principles of bootstrapping are codified and disseminated on the Bootstrap Bootcamp.
2. Pro-actively enhance members' number of connections with each other through the Connector Initiative, Bootstrap Online, BootKarma, initiatives and subgrroups. We help increase the quality of member connections by creating the ability to become a Contributor and collaborate on initiatives.
3. Bootstrap Initiatives are the primary way that bootstrap takes action within our community. Subgroups may create specific project to get their community into action. Our Bootstrap Ambassador reaches out to the extended Austin community, often creating joint events.
4. Protocols are articulated through the Community Playbook. Every technology deployed has a set of protocols - for example, participation in the Bootstrap Austin Yahoo Group has the explicit protocol that members may not sell their wares unless in response to a question from a fellow bootstrapper. Additionally, the community structure provides for 4 distinct levels of engagement: Participant, Active Participant, Contributor and Collaborator.
5. Bootstrap is continually experimenting with, adopting and creating systems to support its activities. We use freely available technologies (blogs, wikis, yahoo groups), member-developed technologies and also create entirely new technologies (BootKarma).
6. Bootstrap has emerged using the principles of bootstrapping. We started innocuously with an informal meeting of 20 entrepreneurs in July, 2003. The community has emerged and evolved with few preconceived notions, allowing the true purpose to organically emerge rather than be imposed. While the process has often been "messy," it has also resulted in a totally unique community.

What We Do for You

We help community builders strengthen their communities through appropriate interventions.

1. Educate your leadership team
2. Assess your community's vibrancy across the 6 principles, including a comprehensive network analysis.
3. Design interventions - leadership, social, technological and across the 6 principles - to address key weak areas.
4. Deploy point or integrated technologies in your community

Contact

• community AT bootstrapaustin DOT org
• 512-474 6155