Open Community Leadership

Module 01 — Experience Is the Community: Self-Guided

The Experience · Open Community Leadership

Working through this alone, at your own pace. Set aside 30–45 minutes, a community you care about, and somewhere to write.

New here? Start with the module overview for the thesis and the canvas. Then come back and work the four steps below.

The experience is the community.

People stay because of what it feels like to be there. They leave for the same reason. This module helps you see your own community's experience clearly enough to improve one part of it.

First, 5 minutes on POPCOM

(too AI-y next sentence) Before you begin, get familiar with POPCOM. It names six parts of a healthy community: Participation, Ownership, Purpose, Connection, Opportunity, Mentorship. It's the lens every module works through.

This module starts with the experience itself. Two POPCOM dimensions, Participation and Connection, also appear as stages on the canvas because they shape so much of how a community feels.

That is enough to begin. You will meet the rest of the framework in later modules.

What you need

  • The Community Experience Canvas. Each stage includes prompts for in-person communities, open source maintenance, and live online communities. Use the prompts that fit yours.
  • Somewhere to write: a notebook, a document, or the printed canvas itself.

Step 1 — Stay / Leave reflection (5 min)

Answer honestly, for yourself:

  1. Think of a community you stayed in. Why did you stay?
  2. Think of a community you left. Why did you leave? Not "I got busy," but what actually stopped giving you a reason to return?

Write down every reason, then look for patterns.

Your reasons for staying may involve feeling welcomed, useful, trusted, recognised, or able to grow. Your reasons for leaving may involve feeling ignored, excluded, stuck, unsafe, or burned out.

Keep those themes nearby. You will use them while mapping your own community.

Step 2 — Map your community (15 min)

Open your canvas. Pick one community you're part of, or one you're thinking of starting. Work through the eight stages: Arrival, Welcome, Participation, Connection, Recognition, Growth, Safety, Return. Write what someone actually experiences at each stage. Not what you wish happened. More like what happens now.

Mark each stage: this works (people stay), this breaks (people leave), or this is an open question you haven't figured out. A blank stage is also a finding. It often means that part of the experience has never been designed.

Step 3 — What's missing? (8 min)

Look at the stages you marked Breaks or left blank.

For each, ask:

  • What's the experience there right now?
  • What would a better experience look like?
  • What's the one small thing standing between the two?

Then write the single most important thing missing from your community's experience. Just one. That's where you start.

Step 4 — One change to test (5 min)

Turn that gap into something you can actually improve:

  • Current experience:
  • Desired experience:
  • First practical action:
  • Who needs to be involved:
  • How I'll know it improved:

Keep it small enough to start this month. The aim is not to redesign your whole community. It is to test one real improvement.

You're done when…

You can point to:

  1. Your stay / leave themes
  2. One completed Community Experience Canvas
  3. The most important thing missing from your community
  4. One change you're going to test

Submit your completion evidence to earn the Experience badge.

Want to share your completion, or compare notes with others doing the module? Tag #OpenCommunityLeadership.

Want to go further?

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