Roles, responsibilities and the new curriculum

[Dedekind561]

Following a conversation with Karen and Lara, I think we need to be aligned on roles vs responsibilities and how we define these things within the community. This will be super useful going forward for clarifying expectations of new members of the community.

Here are some starting observations:

- Different regions often end up creating their own "roles". I've seen some regions refer to roles which don't exist in other regions.

- If there are very few volunteers in a region, volunteers will end up taking on several responsibilities and therefore it is difficult to define what their role is

- Tech-ed volunteers become over-concerned with the definition of roles, instead of focusing on key responsibilities and the bigger picture

- Within the flipped classroom model, there is an expectation that volunteers could do one of several different activities (like code review or facilitation) depending on the needs of the cohort

[Dedekind561]

Do we need roles?

I think it is broadly agreed there is a cohort founder role with certain responsibilities or expectations that are different from other volunteers. In this case, at some minimal level, there need to be roles. What do people think?

[SallyMcGrath]

I think roles in a temporary, contextual sense, work and these Volunteering Roles all the development courses tell us to define don't work. We have tried them so many times and at some point we have to let reality into our plans a bit.

The abstract "role" can't work separate from the group and the actual, temporal cohort. At CYF people do things for other people. Tasks alienated from meaning are not motivating for volunteers, or not our volunteers, who are mainly motivated by human connection and making a tangible impact in someone's life. So all the roles we make up that are task based fall away as the cohort progresses, and by the end it's just, like, a small group of tech ed volunteers committed to their small group of trainees, working through the curriculum.

That's why we tried this cohort founder thing - as that's the end state - so we wanted to find people up for that.

[kfklein15]

We have clear roles in all our documentation. Welcome Event, Corporate Partnership, CYF Docs, Website, name it. People expect to come for a specific role and apply for it accordingly. So in some way, I think there needs to be "a role", but not necessarily many of them.

[SallyMcGrath]

We definitely have roles in our documentation.

[Dedekind561]

What are the minimum level of roles we need across the community?

For example, within Tech-ed do we need to define a role for new volunteers like "Tech-ed support".

[Dedekind561]

Should we focus on a collection of key responsibilities that need to be done for a cohort to be successful as opposed to the roles? Can this be done in conjunction with a minimal set of roles?

🔑 Responsibilities/expectations of tech-ed volunteers during Saturday:

• Review code
• Give feedback
• Faciltate a workshop
• Discuss a problem with trainees
• Debug a problem with trainees
• Time keeper

Is it useful to group these responsibilities into sub-roles or is this counter-productive? The danger with defining roles is people think that a particular thing isn't their responsibility. If we don't define roles, we're implicitly saying this could be your responsibility if the need arises and if you're willing to do it.

[SallyMcGrath]

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1n4vj4zdjKoxeIkV4RPuHKMCMcG0VzgKCgiQNql_TJyw/edit?usp=sharing

[kfklein15]

I think that in the class, it can be Tech Ed (or PD) Facilitator: they do everything that is needed in the class.

Then we have other virtual roles such as Code Reviewers/ CW Reviewer, Tech Buddy/PD Coach, etc.