Open Community Leadership

Module 01 — Experience Is the Community: Mentor Guide

Guidance for Mentors supporting participants through this module.

The Experience · Open Community Leadership

Use this guide when supporting one community leader, a small cohort, or a full workshop group through the module. Adapt the pacing and activities to the number of people and the time available.

Start with the module overview for the central idea and the Community Experience Canvas.

For someone working independently, use the self-guided version. For the complete workshop structure and activities, see the workshop plan.

Attend the workshop before guiding others through it if you can. It is not a requirement, but you will guide it better once you have experienced the process yourself.

Guiding this module also forms part of the pathway towards becoming a Lead Mentor.

Begin with five minutes on POPCOM

POPCOM describes six dimensions of a healthy community:

Participation Ownership Purpose Connection Opportunity Mentorship

Explain the framework plainly. Do not turn the letters into a memory test.

This module is the entry point into POPCOM because it begins with the foundation beneath every dimension: the experience of being inside a community.

Two POPCOM dimensions, Participation and Connection, also appear as stages on the Community Experience Canvas. They are included directly because they shape so much of how a community feels.

That is enough framing. The rest should become visible while the community leader maps their own experience.

Open by grounding the community leader in the wider framework. Keep this to five minutes.

What you're actually doing

Your job is not to explain every part of the canvas. The prompts are designed to work without a lecture.

Your role is to help someone look honestly at their community.

That is often harder than it sounds. People naturally defend the parts they have invested the most time in. They also stop noticing problems that have become normal.

You bring a second pair of eyes.

You may see the gap they have learned to work around. Hold that observation lightly. Ask questions rather than delivering a diagnosis.

Pacing

  • One session (45–60 min): Complete all four steps together:

    • Stay and Leave
    • Community Experience Canvas
    • What Is Missing?
    • One Change to Test

  • Two sessions:

    • Give the community leader a week to sit with what they noticed.
    • In the second session, identify what is missing and choose one change to test.

The space between the sessions often produces the most useful thinking. Stay/Leave + the canvas, then a week to sit with it, then What's Missing + the commitment. The gap between is where the real thinking happens.

How to guide each step

1. Stay / Leave. Let the community leader answer before offering your own examples. Slow them down when they reach the question about leaving. Most people initially say they became busy.

Ask: what actually stopped giving you a reason to return? The honest answer is usually more specific.

Do not pressure them to produce a dramatic story. The useful answer may be small: nobody remembered them, they never found a role, or returning felt no different from attending for the first time.

2. The Community Experience Canvas Hand them the canvas

Each stage includes prompts for in-person communities, repositories, and live online spaces. Ask them to use the prompts that match their context.

Let them work alone before discussing their answers with you. Private thinking helps prevent the conversation from becoming a performance.

When you review the canvas together, pay attention to the blanks.

A blank stage is not a failure to complete the canvas. It usually points to part of the community experience that has never been deliberately designed.

Ask questions such as: "You left Recognition empty. What happens when someone contributes for the second time?"

Who notices when someone returns?

What happens between attending once and becoming involved?

3. What's missing. Resist the urge to solve the gap immediately.

When the community leader identifies something missing, first ask them to describe what a better experience would look like.

The change needs to belong to them. A solution supplied by the Mentor may sound sensible but still go nowhere.

Ask what good would look like there first. The gap they choose to work on has to be theirs, or they won't follow through.

Useful questions include:

What would someone experience if this were working well?

Who would notice the difference?

What would change for a newcomer or returning contributor?

4. One change to test. Make it small. If their plan needs three people and a quarter, it won't happen.

Ask:

What is the smallest part of this you could begin this week?

The action does not need to solve the whole problem. It needs to create evidence that the community can learn from.

What good looks like

The module has landed when the community leader:

  • Identifies a gap that genuinely surprises them
  • Chooses a change small enough to begin
  • Names the people who need to be involved
  • Decides how they will tell whether the change helped

If they leave with a vague "I should improve onboarding," it hasn't landed yet. Push towards something observable: At our next meetup, one named organiser will greet every first-time attendee and introduce them to one returning member. Every first pull request will receive a human response within three days. Returning contributors will be offered one clear next step after their second contribution.

Specific actions can be tested. Vague intentions evaporate.

Spotting disengagement

Mentoring through this sometimes surfaces hard things. Community leadership is often lonely, tiring work, and the canvas can make someone confront how much they're carrying alone. Watch for the following patterns.:

  • The map that's all green. This may mean the community leader is defending their work rather than examining the experience. Ask them to follow one specific newcomer through their first week or first event. Concrete stories usually reveal more than general descriptions.
  • They become quiet at one stage. Often the stage that hurts. Don't force it. Come back to it later, or leave it for them to sit with.
  • They jump to “I am doing everything wrong” The opposite failure. Redirect to the structural observations. You might suggest: most communities are weak at the same stage. This isn't about you failing. It's about a part nobody designs.

You're not their therapist and you're not their fixer. You're the person who helps them see clearly and commit to one real thing. If something heavier comes up, acknowledge it with care and help them identify support beyond this module.

Completion

A community leader has completed the module when they can share:

  1. Their stay / leave themes
  2. One completed Community Experience Canvas
  3. The single most important thing missing from their community
  4. One change they're testing
  5. The date to check whether it worked

The strongest evidence comes later: a real improvement in the community.

That's the moment the module stops being an exercise and becomes a change in their community.

Your progression as a Mentor

Supporting someone through the module is not only service. It is part of your own leadership development.

Record:

  • who or which cohort you supported
  • How you structured the sessions
  • The questions that helped unlock the conversation
  • Where the community leader became stuck
  • What you would change next time
  • The action they chose to test

A Mentor who can guide this module consistently, reflect on their practice, and help other Mentors learn can progress by earning the Lead Mentor badge.

The aim is not simply to teach more sessions.

The aim is to help more community leaders see clearly, act deliberately, and eventually guide others.

CC BY 4.0 — Open Community Leadership. Free to use, adapt, and share with attribution.