For the past year, I’ve been working closely with a truly cutting edge nonprofit called the Ronin Institute for Independent Scholarship. Its mission is to Reinvent Academia by creating new ways to facilitate and promote scholarly research outside of traditional academic research institutions. When I first started working with the Ronin Institute, it was a collection of about 250 Scholars who were loosely connected through a Slack workspace, an affiliation, and one administrator.
Today, the Ronin Institute has 390+ scholars in 49 countries around the world—its membership has grown 30% over the last year. But its success over the last year goes well beyond the growth of its membership. Now there is community-based governance structure for decision-making, including six working groups that provide a way for community members to get involved in the institutional design and implementation. There are also about 25 interest groups that members create to convene other members around similar interests, like complex systems, open science, and universal basic income. In addition, there are regular events, peer-to-peer support, and streamlined communication approaches and use of online platforms. To see how much the Institute has changed since I implemented community activation, take a look at this blog post. Importantly, look below at this trend line for their activity on Slack!
There are a number of things that the Ronin Institute gets right with its community engagement and activation. While we’d love to cover them all, here are three that really stand out:
1. Finding the best solutions for their community
Lesson learned: Giving voice to your community can pave the way for innovative community development.
The Ronin Institute is devoted to creating better models for academia—they recognize that they’ve got to do better than the status quo. And, who is better equipped to find new solutions to old questions around academia than the independent scholars themselves? The Ronin Institute implements a community-based process for developing solutions, and a prime example of this process is its peer governance, which has also been defined in the book Free, Fair, and Alive.
2. Be a yea sayer
Lesson learned: Successful community engagement starts with saying “yes!”.
Stagnant structures can really weigh down a community, and prevent its growth. But by being a Yea Sayer, the Ronin Institute can really commit to incorporating flexibility, diversity, and evolution into the heart of the community. It means that whenever a community member stands up and says: I’d like to do X. The Ronin Institute says: What can we do to help? The benefits for the Institute include empowered community members, providing a path for innovation, and preventing top down perspectives from dominating the community’s evolution.
3. Sticking to values and principles
Lesson learned: Build a strong foundation of trust through your institutional values, and community activation will come easy.
The Ronin Institute’s values are Truth & Empathy, and these two values guide all of their major decision-making. In traditional academic institutions, for example, membership gatekeeping is provided by metrics like previous affiliations, recent products, and number of publications. With what we know about privilege and power dynamics in academia, these metrics don’t really map to their mission (e.g., academic freedom). In contrast, the Ronin Institute uses the metrics of truth and empathy to determine new and continued membership to the Institution. For an example, check out the Ronin Institute’s unique take on a Code of Conduct.
The Ronin Institute is an example of one of the healthiest community build outs that I’ve come across. Do you know of any others?