When looking at communities and trying to de-construct and understand how they work, we can often approach it from an overtly task-based approach – identifying methods in which communities are successful at *doing stuff*. Of course, effective, measurable outcomes are important in community, but it is also critical to sometimes help your community step back and identify some of the things we often take for granted, one such thing being *friendships*.

Everyone, and by that I mean *everyone*, including you, dear reader, needs to feel respected and socially connected with fellow community members – if this most basic need is met, *effective community* can give you a sense of belonging that is difficult to replace. Communities that get this right experience incredible commitment from their members, and their members engage at not only a collaborative level, but a social level too. Retention, be it staff or volunteer, is critical to the success of any collaborative group, and you can translate this into *foster a culture of people being decent to each other, which invariably results in friendships, and they will be happy and stick around*. Of course, this culture will not paper over the cracks of bad processes, resource issues, bottlenecks and other unsavoury problems, but good community is about multiple strands coming together to form a solid, consistent picture.

It can often be tempting to let the pieces of the jigsaw overshadow the bigger picture, don’t let it happen to your community. 🙂

Currently over at [SCALE](https://www.socallinuxexpo.com/) in Los Angeles and the Women In Open Source track has just kicked off today – looks like it is going to be an excellent day, with some facinating tracks. It is being kicked off by my friend Allison Randell, who is also speaking at [LugRadio Live USE 2008](). Speaking of which, we have worked hard to try and get the demographic of women up at LugRadio Live – although we have a number of women who attend as visitors, the speaking rosta has been somewhat devoid of women, for no other reason than the lack of papers being submitted. This year I am pleased to see that we have a number of women confirmed – Danese Cooper, Val Henson, Allison Randal, Belinda Lopez and Kristen Accardi, and we hope to see more women participating as we finish off confirming speakers.

One person who has been inspiring me in much of this is my good friend, [Emma Jane Hogbin](https://emmajane.net/), who I think really *gets* the issues involved, and will hopefully be presenting at LugRadio Live UK 2008. We have talked quite a bit on the phone about how to encourage more women in Open Source, and she is spending some of her efforts with the Ubuntu Women project. She sent her slides over and they look excellent, and particularly amusing too. 🙂