Grouplet Guide

Structure

A grouplet, like any social group with a mission, needs to organize. With a lightweight structure in place to facilitate communication, coordination, and collaboration, a small group can achieve a tremdous impact.

• Commitment model
• Roles
• Probability of success
• Sense of efficiency
• Distribution of responsibilities
• Distribution of communication
• Efficiency eliminates guilt

Commitment model

Borrowed from The Rainbow of Death (CC-BY-4.0), the “commitment model” explains how to distribute responsibilities effectively across a range of volunteers according to their level of availability:

• Core: Core members define the vision for accomplishing the mission, assume major responsibilities and drive major initiatives, and communicate to other volunteers the roles they can fill to execute on important parts of the operation.
• Partial: Partially-committed members assume important, if not major roles, to ensure that ongoing tasks are consistently fulfilled over the long-term. Whereas core members function strategically, partially-committed members function tactically, driving regular activities that ensure momentum is created, maintained, and amplified.
• Occasional: The majority of volunteers will be occasionally involved, offering their time and energy as they can, when they can, to drive the mission forward. While not as committed as the other levels, their actions are critical to creating widespread, tangible, lasting change

Here’s how these commitment levels looked in reality for the Google Testing Grouplet:

• Core: The core group consisted of the Testing Grouplet leads and active core members; [Fixit][] organizers and core team members recruited to fulfill specific roles; and the coordinators of the Testing on the Toilet and Test Certified programs.
• Partial: The partially-committed volunteers consisted of regular Testing on the Toilet reviewers and posters, Test Certified mentors, and local Fixit Instigators that acted as Fixit organizers for each of their offices.
• Occasional: Many other volunteers wrote Testing on the Toilet episodes, Codelabs, or other documentation; gave Tech Talks on specific testing concepts, tools, or techniques; or did their part during Fixit events to improve their own team’s tests and practices.

In order for grouplet initiatives to become successful, they require a balance of all three types of commitment from volunteers across the organization. No matter how much time and energy someone has to give, a grouplet must have a struture and activities that can make the best use of it.

Roles

Though a grouplet leader (usually) isn’t in a formal supervisory role over other grouplet members, there’s still a strong need to establish a basic, functional team structure in order to orient members within the group and provide a channel for their creativity. However, rather than adopting a heavy-handed command-and-control style, have fun with the role names!

As an example, here is a prospective list of roles—and no, you may not need all of them, at least not right away or all the time:

The Walrus (Organizer): Mike Bland
Assumes ownership of the overall effort. Responsible for: establishing direction and priorities, delegating tasks, removing obstacles, and getting their hands dirty when needed.

Prime Mover (Project Manager): Mike Bland
Ensures that tasks are assigned and executed, reserves the meeting room, manages remote coordination, ensures that the Historian’s minutes are posted in a timely manner.

Historian (Archivist): Mike Bland
Responsible for documenting, summarizing, and archiving notable issues or activities and their artifacts in a centrally-accessible repository (such as the home page). Meeting minutes fall under this rubric, as to retrospectives to ensure valuable lessons are recorded for the benefit of future generations.

Minister of Information (Documentation Coordinator): Mike Bland
Solicits and helps cultivate documentation, technical and otherwise, in support of the grouplet’s mission.

Cat Herder (Tech Talk Coordinator): Mike Bland
Solicits volunteers to produce documentation and tech talks across all teams and offices.

Minister of Propaganda (Publicist): Mike Bland
Raises awareness of and excitement around the grouplet and its initiatives and events. Responsible for the design and distribution of promotional material.

Minister of Communication (Communication Coordinator): Mike Bland
Ensures that Slack channels and other communication media are accessible, useful, and broadly used by the group. May suggest alternate communication media or innovative uses of the media already in use.

Scheduler (Scheduler) Mike Bland
Schedules meetings and events, takes care of reservations and logistics, and maintains a published calendar.

Contact Czar/Czarina (Contact/Volunteer Coordinator): Mike Bland
Recruits Local Instigators (Office Contacts) across various offices and keeps them engaged, making sure they’re equipped with flyers and other propaganda, and responding to their requests and concerns.

Local Instigators (Office Contacts):
Representatives of the grouplet and its events and initiatives across offices who ensure the sense of engagement with the main grouplet.

Mayor of Jonestown (Occasional Volunteer Coordinator): Mike Bland
Focuses on recruiting new hires and other occasional volunteers to aid with publicity and schwag delivery. Ensures their tasks are well-defined and well-communicated.

Heart and Soul (Recoginition Coordinator): Mike Bland
Ensures volunteers and event participants are recognized and rewarded for their contributions, in ways large and small.

Schwagmeister (Prize Coordinator): Mike Bland
Designs, procures, and distributes prizes, awards, and other schwag.

Wordsmith (Content Designer): Mike Bland
Explores and promotes standardized means of organizing artifacts and their content, for example the use of tags, application of CSS styles, traditional SEO techniques for organizing content and making it more easily discoverable.

Festmeister (Event Planner/Manager): Mike Bland
Plans events and ensures food, drinks, and other items are procured and delivered.

Hacker (Tech Lead/Tools Developer): Mike Bland
Responsible for the development of any associated programs or systems.

Field Commander (War Room Coordinator): Mike Bland
Recruits volunteers for and manages a local war room during Fixits and similar events, where volunteers within an office congregate to collaborate on technical issues, and where participants can walk in to seek assistance.

Damned Liar (Statistician): Mike Bland
Collects metrics on the grouplet’s impact, and that of its events and specific initiatives, and makes it sound like the numbers actually mean something.

Minister of Phynance (Accountant): Mike Bland
Secures funding and manages the budget for schwag and prizes.

Probability of success

Notice the number of roles with the organizers’ names next to them in red. You can point recruits at this list when pitching them, or during the kick-off meeting, and explain this:

The grouplet’s long-term chances of success are inversely proportional to the number of Roles that have the organizers’ names next to them in red!

People can quickly see where help is most needed and jump in accordingly.

Sense of efficiency

The prospective separation of responsibilities as defined in the two-pager give prospective recruits a sense that the team is (or will become) well-organized and efficient. Keeping the actual titles fun sends a message that the group is not about piling additional work onto people for the sake of the organizer’s personal ambition.

Distribution of responsibilities

Good roles serve two critical functions: delegation and escalation. The Organizers should not be the only ones responsible for every detail of the overall effort.

There need not be a one-to-one correspondence between roles and individuals. One person can serve more than one role, and one role can be filled by more than one person. The important part is that the functions and those responsible for them are made clear.

Distribution of communication

Also, when responsibilities are clear, grouplet members may be able to manage tasks by going directly to the appropriate role-holder, rather than the organizers having to remain in the critical path of every decision. In other words, “creativity is pushed towards the edge of the organization”. (Need “Technical Impact” citation.)

Efficiency eliminates guilt

Given an understanding of the commitment model and the distribution of responsibilities, it’s possible to design a grouplet to take maximum advantage of the time and energy that people can afford to contribute at any given time. More specifically:

No one should feel the need to apologize for letting the grouplet down when other priorities demand their attention!

While volunteer participation is always greatly appreciated, if the grouplet fails to maintain momentum because some individuals need to focus on other things for a while, that’s the fault of the grouplet leads, not the volunteers.

It’s the grouplet leads’ job to ensure that the grouplet maintains some degree of forward momentum given fluctuating degrees of volunteer availability—and it’s the goal of this guide to give grouplet leads the tools they need to achieve that.