2017/Nuremberg/onboarding

 Onboarding & Personas  was a session at IndieWebCamp Nuremberg 2017 in continuation of the similarly themed session at IndieWebCamp Berlin 2016 and session at IndieWebCamp Düsseldorf 2017.

Participating

 * Martin Haseneyer
 * Oliver
 * Oliver
 * Oliver
 * Oliver

Day 1: barcamp session
Session: Onboarding & Personas

When: 2017-05-20 14:30

Participants

 * Martin Haseneyer
 * Martin Haseneyer

session participants

 * Martin Haseneyer
 * Oliver
 * Martin Haseneyer
 * Oliver
 * Oliver

Discussion
While the model of four Indieweb generations is still valid, it has a strong temporal component: how the community can extend its reach over time. The value of the personas we are developing is that of illustrating certain core personalities that should be considered along with this overall "roadmap".

Placing our personas on the indieweb generation pyramid:
 * Tom obviously sits right on the very top of the "development leaders" pyramid: always connected to IRC, Wiki etc.; this is the demographic the current processes and tools are strongly geared toward
 * Milena and Bob represent an apparent gap at the lower part of gen 1 in the generations model: people who want to technically/conceptually engage in the Indieweb community, but with less commitment/skills/continuity than Tom. This is the target group we identified in the 2016 Berlin camp as being rather well represented among the attendants (same applies to the 2017 Düsseldorf and Nuremberg camps) but struggling with the onboarding, documentation, value proposition and communications being tuned more towards Tom-like characters. Based on feedback on newcomers' onboarding experience - collected over the last few IndieWebCamps - there appears to be a challenge to introduce people who want to be part of the "development leaders" generation, attend IndieWebCamps etc, but for whom the current Wiki-IRC-Communications package is not accessible enough.
 * Steven, as described in the persona, is located at the upper half of gen 2: a publicist, but with strong technical skills that enable him to jump on the train early. This is a relevant persona mostly because it is one of the easy-to-reach gen 2 prospects, but again would likely need more accessible entry points. The Indieweb community has actually already seen a few such tech-savvy journalists promoting/implementing the Indieweb philosophy.
 * Ellie and Penny are clearly at the lower end of the pyramid (bottom gen 3 or gen 4), hence their personas are currently mostly interesting as a long-term perspective, but also to keep our minds calibrated towards the different onboarding/communication needs of upcoming generations in the future.



We also discussed the two-fold value of these personas for the Indieweb, both internally and externally:

Internally:
 * personas serve as imaginary audiences as we consider our communications to reach these demographics

Externally:
 * in communicating our value proposition ("why you should be interested")
 * designing entry points and onboarding tools ("how to get started")

Some ideas (brainstorm, with no further discussion) for reaching new target groups better, include e.g.:
 * tutorials
 * videos
 * (stickers)
 * a parallel event format to IWC (targeted to certain audience skill/interest level)
 * simple documentation of core principles outside of the wiki ( has actually been working on an effort in this direction during the Nuremberg IWC). This project is called IndieWebGuides.

Personas
We continued our work on developing indieweb personas, that were half-finished after IWC Berlin 2016. Below table is an updated and extended version of the initial draft from the original session (preserved to document the history and not edit last year's documentation)