Convening
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Convening
What kind of convening opportunities/events fit with your community in general?
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Communication, connection and conversation
What covening opportunities will you design to create and encourage connections, conversations and communication?
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Boundary-spanning
How do you regularly feed your community with external expertise and promote access to other networks?
Convening is the art of bringing the community (of practice) and relevant stakeholders together to connect members and engage them in meaningful conversations. The diversity of a community and a risk-free and inclusive environment help develop conversations and engage members. To learn how to nurture a risk-free trusted environment, which is needed for meaningful convening, please see Sections 3.3, ‘Governance’, and 3.7, ‘Community management’.
Convening the community on a regular basis keeps it alive and thriving. It involves communicating with members, connecting them and encouraging conversations.
It also implies boundary-spanning activities (i.e. linking the community with external sources of knowledge), which involve regularly injecting external expertise on the community of practice into the community and ensuring access and connections to other networks.
You will learn:
- how to choose different convening methods and make them work for your community
- how to design and bridge the gap between interactions within inside and outside the community
- how to ensure community engagement based on a solid convening strategy built on conversation, connection, communication and boundary-spanning activities