See also:

• List of Roles and Teams

What Roles are

• Roles that community members can participate in to help out, according to their experience, availability & interests. To make our community more efficient and scalable.
• They are mentors, coordinators, facilitators.
• A way to make it easier to get involved
• A way to deal with information overload.
• They are waiting for you to be part of!
• Self-organizing
• Dogfooding, Organic Groups, Group Watch, PluginInvite, PluginMemberList and PluginSubscribeGroups features. It's wiki-way project management!
  • Do people meet? We sometimes use a BigBlueButton room and have PluginConvene to decide when to have meetings which are all online.

What Roles are not

• They are not closed. Anyone can help out in any role, and in more than one role as their interest and time permits.
• The community is wiki way! You don't have to ask permission to commit code or improve the documentation for example. We don't want any potential bottlenecks.

What you should do if you are part of a role

Help to maintain your wiki page which answers:

• What? Why? Who? When? How? etc.
  • It should be easy to see current status and for anyone to jump in and help
• Suggested sections
  • Intro, which is page inclusion like from Roles and Teams
  • Important or urgent things
  • Ongoing responsibilities (what are the recurring tasks and who is doing it or looking-for-a-volunteer)
  • One time tasks do-and-cross-out type tasks (A few hours at most, who is doing it or looking-for-a-volunteer, and estimated completion date)
  • What are the responsibilities at each release? Release Roles
  • Projects (Things that take dozens of hours)
    • Once the project is completed, it will likely lead to adding new items to ongoing responsibilities
  • Main *.tiki.org sites related to this team
    • Lead: I commit to making things better here
    • Help: I can't take a leadership position, but will help when I can (and when asked)
    • Follow: I am interested in this stuff but not ready to help yet. Keep me in the loop of what is happening
  • Share procedures, best practices, etc.

What Teams are

Tiki believes in the power of self-organization and is *not* a top down organization. We believe in keeping hierarchy to a minimum. Any person can help out from time to time in one or more roles, and over time certain individuals might become more actively be involved in coordination or leadership than others, but this should not change the fact that anyone is able to participate in and contribute to a role when they wish to.

Not all roles have teams associated with them. However, certain roles require a more official structure because of the nature of the work, for e.g. the Security Team would only admit people that we trust highly, and the same goes for the Communications Team who is responsible for putting out official communications representing the Tiki Community, and the Finance Team who manages funds for the Tiki Software Community Association.

So in summary, a Team is simply a more formal and structured group of individuals that is responsible for a particular Role. Each Team is free to setup it's own policies, structures and membership criteria in collaboration with the Tiki Admin Group. In general, it is recommended to keep unnecessary hierarchy and red-tape to an absolute minimum, and to encourage open participation from volunteers even if they are not official members of a Team.