We're at time.
We're going to get started.
Everybody please welcome Anesca Miro.
Hey there.
Thank you for having me.
It's kind of a big thing for me to stand here because last year was my first foster
and I really enjoyed it as a volunteer here and as an attendee.
So standing here and being able to share some of my work with you, it is kind of like a
big achievement for me.
Oh, thank you.
And I'm active in various open source communities but the reason why I'm here today is being
an community, operations and community builder in Chesco de Gitao which could be translated
as Czechia Digital but I'm going to use the pronunciation Chesco de Gitao because that's
how we, that's why I say it.
And one of my role with the community brought me to this question, where are the limits
of open communities or are there any limits and how can we face that?
So first I need to give you some context of Chesco de Gitao to show you what we do and
how we do it.
Then I'm going to tell you what the word open means for us and what challenges it brought
to us in the last year and years.
And where are we now?
Which is not the end of the journey as we'll see but it's like continuous process.
Hopefully I'll have enough time at the end for the questions and not only for the questions
but I would love to hear your stories because you know, all of you, as it's for them, all
of you are somehow active in open source communities so I'm sure that we all have something to
say to that.
So first start, what Chesco de Gitao is.
It is a small NGO based in Czechia consisting of like 12 people in the core team and we
have like clear mission which is to help other NGOs and public administration in Czechia
to use digital technologies to its full potential.
Basically it means that we guide other NGOs and organizations from public administration
through the process of digital transformation as vague as it sounds it also is because some
of these organizations are on the baseline just needing to learn basic digital skills,
some of them just need to help to create some digital products so we do all of that but
I mentioned 12 of us so we can do it alone.
We have kind of like big community, really diverse consisting of expert volunteers who
are from the field of marketing, product management, project management, software development,
UX designers, all of that you need to succeed in the digital world.
We also have people from NGOs, people from public administration and people from various
businesses who just like our vision and will support us.
And we started in 2019 and since then since that we gathered more than 6,000 people in
our slack which is our main environment and with all those people over those five years
we finished more than 30 projects which impacted more than 4 million people in Czechia.
Czechia has around 10 million people so I guess it's quite an achievement and it's all thanks
to the community we are.
So that's what we do and how we do it.
We consider ourselves being value based organization and value based community.
We have five core values which are not only written, we try to live them day by day in
our day to day work and they are basically the baseline for most of our decisions.
The first of them and the reason I'm here is openness and I'm going to also skip it
for now because I'm going to talk about it later.
But the next of them is professionalism.
We're a really diverse community and when you have people from NGOs and business and
public administration like totally different mindsets, totally different life experience
and we have people from junior, middle, senior level and all of them having different life
experience.
The professionalism is a baseline for having good relationships in the community because
we interact as professionals, we believe that all opinion matters and that we all can learn
from each other and we strongly support collaboration, the next value.
Especially in public administration people tend to build silos and work independently
on other departments and we believe that through collaboration we can achieve more and have
bigger impact.
So that's what we try to teach in our community, to empower in our community and then people
can use it in their day by day work.
And we mostly volunteer based organization.
So efficiency is really important value for us because people give us the most precious
things they have, their free time and their know how and we don't want to waste any of
that.
Also our partners because we're funded from the private sector, we don't want to waste
any of the resources given to us.
So efficiency is really, really crucial.
And then usefulness.
This one is focused mostly on the solutions we built in our organization and our community.
Because when you see digital technologies we may be perceived as a highly technical community
which we are actually not because our target groups are NGOs and public administration
which usually have lower level of technical knowledge or financial resources.
So we have to be able to build solutions which are sustainable for them and which they can
administer by themselves.
So usually 10 to years, no code or low code platforms which are easily manageable for
those organizations.
So usefulness is a core value for building the products or building the solutions to
be useful for the end user.
It's really, really important.
And then back to the openness.
What does it mean in context of Chesco Digital?
Where we have open code, it's a necessary condition for all the products we agree to
work on and all the organization we work with to have open code, to have their repositories
and get up under the least restrictive open source licenses.
We also have open knowledge base.
We have our own Wikipedia where we gather all knowledge we learned over those last five
years.
Also all the examples of where not to go and a lot of guides for, I don't know, how to
create a successful webinar, how to cut videos, how to work with volunteers, how to build
digital projects from scratch.
I like to say that there is everything in our Wikipedia where you know what you're looking
for.
It's built on confluence so it tends to be quite messy and sometimes outdated and sorry
for that, but it's kind of a rich source of information.
We have transparent funding.
We have transparent account when you can find all the financial transactions.
We openly speak about our partners and sponsors, how much money they give us and how we spend
them.
We also speak openly about the money we as a core team get.
You can basically find all aspects of our financial management from our transparent resources
and learn how we are doing it that way.
We strongly empower open communication.
That's the reason why I'm here to share our story with you and that's visible mostly in
our Slack.
I bet that some of you know Slack, most of you know Slack and when you have Slack with
an average 600 people active each month, it's kind of like beehive.
It's really messy sometimes, but we really try to limit private conversations and private
channels so everybody who joins can learn everything as fast as possible.
We have as lowest barrier to join any project on the conversation you want.
There's huge traffic in our Slack, but we have also other communication channels.
Again, this is something we try to teach our target groups because we want to teach people
that through collaboration, through open communication, open feedback and stuff like that, we can
build meaningful relationships and achieve more together.
This is one of our messages for the whole community we work with.
What challenges this approach brings to us?
The first one is actually hidden in the world open itself because it's just a word drive
and we're a really diverse community.
This word has so many different meanings for so many people.
Even in our small core team, 12 people, we were all over the spectrum from being open
no matter what to open by default.
Yeah, have things open, but when there is a really good reason, really valid reason to
have something not shared, let's not share it because it can do some harm.
We needed to balance that not only in our team but in the whole community so they know
what to expect.
I'm going to briefly go through all the challenges and then get to how we handle that.
The word open or the meaning of open.
Then with the communication, I mentioned that our Slack is kind of like has a huge traffic.
Slack is not really good for having big announcements and stuff like that because it's mostly for
project communications, communications in teams.
It's like fast pace, a lot of traffic, things get lost, not really intuitive to search in.
But we used it for quite a long time as a single source of information because we don't
want people to follow many different channels.
We constantly received feedback that people are missing stuff, that we're not sharing
things.
Come on people, that wasn't Slack, it's actually one of our stickers.
It wasn't Slack.
It's why they're popular even in business.
So we tried newsletter, one newsletter, but we do so many stuff in one time that even
in the newsletter, it was so long that people stopped reading it.
So when you want to share stuff, when we want to tell people about what we're doing, how
can we contribute?
But at the same time, to prioritize, when to say something to get the right information
to the right people at the right time, how to keep the communication efficient, that
was the next challenge because you want to share stuff.
And then the one which was kind of like technical interesting was the information security.
They just started in 2019 as a bunch of programmers who knew themselves very well.
And they just started to work on some project for some NGO and then the word spread and
it started growing.
But several months it was just group of people who knew each other.
So there was no need to apply any strict security measures.
But then COVID came and Chesco Dicatal grew quite rapidly from like dozens of people to
several thousands of people.
And there were multiple projects in the same time with different needs for information,
different needs of tool sets, different needs for data and stuff like that.
And then over the journey we kind of lost track on who needs to access what and who
is responsible for which tools and so.
So yeah, we were still able to maintain security somehow, but when you don't have someone responsible,
so the share responsibility in the word of data security doesn't work.
So we needed to take a step back and think about how can we guarantee some security to
our community and still keep this open approach.
And the last one which I picked for you today was the toughest one for me as a community
builder.
Because we at the beginning when we announced our mission, we were so happy that people
are joining Chesco Dicatal and they share the passion to help NGOs and share the urge
to help public administration with digitization.
And they share our journey and they will help us that we wanted to accommodate everyone
and then we started creating opportunities based on the needs of the community.
And we really lost track of who we are, what is our position on the map of systemic change
in Czechia.
And we faced the decision about yeah, we still want to be open community, but does it mean
that we need to be open for everybody and to create something for everybody who comes?
And this was the biggest challenge for me.
So what we did about all that, first thing you see there is code of conduct.
Maybe surprising that we didn't have one because it's like the good practice of open
communities to have code of conduct.
But remember we are a value based community.
So we thought that having the values stated is enough.
But then I also mentioned the different meanings of the word open.
I mean five values, five words, so many meanings for those people.
So we felt that we need to set up at least some of the values that we need to set up
and some basic rules or to explain to our community what do we mean by those values.
So we created code of conduct which basically is a translation of our values to like more
words to specify more.
What to expect when you join Czechoslovakia, what we do, how we do it, what we want from
you, what you can expect from us and how can we secure the safe space for our community.
How can we handle troubles and stuff like that.
So six months ago actually we applied code of conduct.
Kind of late but it exists.
Then, yay, new communication channels.
More to that, yeah.
Sounds confusing but for us it meant that we want to use the communication channels for
the best purpose they solve.
So we keep Slack purely for the project communication.
We took the important stuff out of that and for example the long-lasting topics or repeating
questions and stuff like that we built an open discussion forum based on this course.
So we have this one for that which is also more to the open communication because it's
not hidden by the barriers of Slack.
It's open for reading.
You don't have to sign in.
So this is also good for our target groups because most of the NGOs we learned over the
way that they find Slack not very intuitive for them to use so they at the end maybe even
didn't join.
So that's new community forum.
And we're also working on restructuring of our newsletters.
So we have only the important stuff there and we're also building a new app somewhere
between our website and the Slack where we'll have all the information for the community.
So it's not getting lost in Slack.
So it may be like, yeah, we have more channels but single purpose ones which may be easier
to follow because you can pick the one which you want to follow.
And then regarding the security.
We did kind of like security check.
We put together all the data we have, all the tools, all the databases, everything.
We spent several months on going through the accesses and what do we really need?
We can rid of not to store data we don't need.
And for now it is that every person from our team is responsible for specific tools and
specific data and we're doing regular checks on who can access what.
It doesn't mean that we don't want to share.
We just want to know who can access what and manage the accesses.
And then about the open community itself, we spend more than a year defining our needs
and finding our position on the map of how we can help best the public administration
and NGOs in Czech Republic with digital transformation.
And the biggest switch in my head was, yeah, I want to have a community who is thriving.
But actually it doesn't mean that I need, that I have to take everybody's needs to account.
I need to follow the vision of the organization and we need to be clear to say out loud,
like that's what we do, that's our mission, that's how you can help us, that's where we need you.
And you're welcome to join to help us achieve the goal.
And if it means that there isn't room for you, we'll be happy when you follow, when you share what we do, if you like it.
But we can't accommodate everybody's needs because we can't afford to lose focus.
When we want to have a big impact, when we want to change something, we need to stay focused on our mission.
So that's about it.
So that's how we faced the challenges.
As I mentioned at the beginning, it's not the end of the journey, it's still a process.
We're still creating and trying.
We're doing baby steps to achieve our goals and our mission.
But hopefully I touched some points which may be inspiring for you.
And I'd love to hear your stories or questions.
I'm here. Talk to me.
Any questions?
Oh no, there's the saddest thing.
Please share your story.
Okay, I'm coming back at the microphone.
Thank you.
Worst thing that can happen to a speaker, not a different question.
Thank you for the wholesome talk.
I really relate to a lot of things you're talking about when your community grows and communication gets lost
and different people consuming your information differently.
Are you documenting it somewhere?
If we can follow, because it just sounds like you have done a lot of thinking about what this single source of information looks like.
Yeah, we do. But unfortunately, as we oriented on stuff in Czechia, we documented in Czech.
But I'm thinking about, because I'm creating my own website, I'm thinking about translating some of that to some both posts and stuff like that
because actually I did this talk earlier on our journey, so with different topics.
Half a year ago on the Czech conference, Focus on Open Source.
And it was just an experiment if this actually interests anybody.
So I can see it does. So it actually inspires me to translate it in English.
Thank you for the question.
So the question at the back here. Can you just put your hand? Thank you very much.
Do you know who gave my step?
I have to work off the waffles.
I have a question about the needs of the community.
And if you use any tools or how do you stay close to the needs of the community and how do you then answer that?
Yeah, I do regular well-being research, like each quarter, where there are close questions for some metrics, but also plenty of open.
So usually I have 10% of community answering, which is not much, but I'm happy to have at least some, so let's say 60 to 70 responses.
And we're trying to work on every of them. So that's the first one.
And the second, we did kind of like intense research half a year ago with a design agency.
And there were also not only written feedback, but also some deep, sorry, I forgot the word, but deep talking with the people.
And so we're really working hard to get the needs right and do the mapping of our community.
So we know what would be best to pursue. So yeah, we work on that hard.
Hi, I would like to ask if you can give us more details on how do you slice the responsibilities? What was your approach?
Yeah, that's actually the easy one. Thank you for that.
I guess it's 12 members of the core team in just going to tell and each of us different responsibilities.
So we divided the resources based on the group of responsibilities we have.
So for example, when we have a database, which stores data of volunteers, I am the community builder.
So I am responsible for that one.
I have a colleague who's responsible for all the activities we do for NGOs.
So she is responsible for the base where we store data for CRM and tools that's connected to that.
So that was actually the easier job than it sounds because we divided the responsibilities based on the responsibilities we already have.
Thank you.
Hi, thank you very much for this very interesting two questions.
One, what is the tool you use for access management and so on?
And how do you verify that would be very interesting for us to also know what you're using?
A second question. I'm interested in knowing how did you manage to scale up because that is one of the biggest questions that, for example, in my work,
we're trying to figure out how on earth can we go from 20 to a thousand developers, right? Thank you.
First, we have, as Slack is our main environment for now, we have two steps how to get in.
The first is registering in our own base where you fill up the data about yourself, which then allows you to go to Slack.
But now as we are creating the middle layer, we are creating our own.
So we still actually, we have a workshop next week about it, how to find the right tool for where to build your profile on that.
So we'll see about that one.
And about scaling. Well, at first, when it was like several dozens of people, it was just self-organized, let's say.
And then over time, the core team was built. So it's 12 of us right now.
But we work closely with the community. So for example, in my team, I have two buddies and they are contacting on a grow basis.
After five days, you join our Slack. One of them is actively contacting you asking if you have any troubles and so.
So we work closely with volunteer base and we have those who want to be more active with our volunteers.
So that's just how we scale. Thanks to our community.
So I have a question that haunts me for years and related to open communities.
And you have used the word a lot, but the question for me is who is we and how does one become part of that week?
Yeah. Well, I identify as the part of Chiskorigita and how to be part of that.
It's kind of like as I answered regarding the information about the resources, we're focused on the check environment.
So it's mostly for the check speaking people, but through the website Chiskor, the digital, you can find all the information in there.
I believe that no, here not. Sorry. So on the first slide, yeah, there are our social media accounts.
So you can find information about that. And then it's really easy to join. It's easy to join.
It's much tougher to right now to contribute because, you know, in the process, we are in the process of transition as we found ourselves finally.
So we're recreating all the opportunities. So right now we're, yeah, I've figured it out. Thank you for the question.
I have a question, maybe less about the open it, but more about the project that you run.
Sorry, about?
I have about the project that you run because one of your goals is, you know, to transform to like digital kind of way of thinking.
Yes. And curious, how do you ensure and measure the long lasting impact of the work that you do?
Because I guess the work that you do, you want that to be long lasting and kind of outlive you, right?
Yeah, thank you. Great question.
We have quite a tough process of choosing the project we start to cooperate on.
And we have strict and less strict measures of the projects we accept, but the sustainability is one of them.
So when you ask our community for help, we ask you what are your plans, kind of like midterm and long term with the project?
It has to be a crucial part of your operations.
I mean, for example, we cooperated with NGO focused on cancer prevention, and they needed a tool how to reach more people than by talks and conferences.
And together we built a mobile app, and it was core tool for them to continue with their work.
So there's an example of that. So it should be the crucial part for the functioning of the organization.
And you don't have to have funding already, but you should have a plan how to get funding for it and to support it at least several years.
So yeah, several steps during the process of exception of the cooperation to...
You never can guarantee anything, but we try to do our best to choose the projects which aspire to be long term active.
So because we don't want to waste the energy of the community invested to the project. Thank you for the question.
So folks, we're actually at time.
Okay.
So the reason is the question is for the benefit of the public.
Yeah, perfect. Thank you. Thank you very much for having me. Thank you.
Thank you.