I’m an Interaction conference lifer. I’ve attended all 8 conferences. In all those years, I only missed one Local Leader Workshop (LLW), due to the fact that I was leading my own workshop. This year’s LLW, hosted by Adaptive Path, was the most productive one yet.
In the early years, it was enough to just get together and learn from each other about how our groups were run and the types of events we held. In recent years, however, I’ve felt as though we have been spinning our wheels. We would identify issues we were facing, stick a bunch of Post-It notes on the wall, and then do it again the next year. We weren’t focussed enough. We never left the workshop with anything actionable. Nobody took responsibility. Other long-time leaders I talked to felt the same way.
This year was different. We divided into teams, each focussed on a significant issue that had been raised and documented the year before. Each team was tasked first to understand and communicate the issue, and then to develop a plan for solving the issue, complete with a timetable, suggested actions and deliverables, and measurements of success. Names and contact information were recorded.
IxDA Pittsburgh was one of the earliest local groups to form. I’ve been either co-chair or a member of the planning committee for over 8 years now. We saw growth early on, but for several years now, we really haven’t been doing anything to improve our local design community. We’ve been maintaining it, yes, but we haven’t advanced. I was, therefore, most interested in the topic of local group maturity.
We began by asking ourselves what maturity means in the context of a local group. What does a mature local group look like? We realized that there are a number of different areas in which a local group can mature. It can mature in its organization and management, in its programming, in its finances, or its community involvement. There are likely others.
We formed a theory of local group maturity:
Most of the other issues that were being addressed in the workshop could be mapped to an area of maturity. Therefore, should a group identify an issue as a problem they want to solve, maturity in the respective area will help them solve it.
One of the main goals of a local group is to support its local design community. A significant approach to this is to provide programs. So, most local groups desire to mature in their programming.
To be able to focus on programming, a group should first mature in its own logistical management.
A mature logistical management is largely dependent on a well organized team. Thus, local groups should move from wrangling volunteers to establishing steering committees with defined roles and responsibilities.
We also recognized that there are different levels of maturity in each area. A group may be very mature in its programming while not having any kind of financial arrangements in place. Furthermore, lack of maturity in an area isn’t necessarily a problem. Each group should be free to decide what level of maturity they want to reach in any given area based on their own goals for their group. In other words, maturity isn’t a measure of how good or bad a group is. Maturity isn’t necessarily an indicator of success.
Our solution, then, must be a roadmap by which groups can envision goals for themselves and find guidance to achieve them. It should be a tool with which a group can analyze and ascertain its current levels of maturity. Once several groups have done so, it can facilitate comparisons between groups, providing a framework around which groups can share their successes and failures with each other.
I can’t speak for any of the other groups at the workshop, but I was extremely pleased with the outcome of our session. We identified the steps that would need to be taken to develop such a tool, and we proposed a schedule for it. I, for one, will be happy to give my time to make it happen. I’m going to focus on maturing IxDA Pittsburgh, as soon as I’m done chairing Midwest UX 2015.
