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Location:  International, Anywhere; 100% Remote

About OPEN

The Online Progressive Engagement Network (OPEN) is a not-for-profit organisation that supports digital campaigning groups in more than 19 countries to share knowledge, build connections across borders, and run collaborative campaigns on a range of issues, all in order to win progressive change.

Summary

OPEN is looking for a creative, motivated and experienced community coordinator specialist who can foster deeper connections in our technology community. Our community members, all not-for-profit digital campaigning organisations, range from large and established NGOs with millions of members, to small start-ups breaking new ground in their countries. They’re all committed to innovative, accessible campaigning that makes people power win.

As the Community Engagement Coordinator – Technology, you will be a part of our Technology Team, consisting of OPEN’s Chief Technology Officer and the Director of Engineering. Together, you will ensure OPEN’s online tech community thrives! 

The OPEN tech community includes around 150 staff at our 20 member organisations, who work in tech, digital or data, or have an interest in these activities. This role exists to strengthen this community, make inidual and group connections, and foster an inclusive and accessible environment in which ideas can be shared, know-how built up, and capacity increased. Success in this role is OPEN member organisations creating more impact, through tech/digital/data activities which are enhanced by being part of the tech community. 

Duties and responsibilities

• Driving activity and useful knowledge transfer and mutual aid through online platforms including Slack and email.
• Creating content for and distributing newsletters and other knowledge bases (including written, audio and video content), and packaging up content from others in suitable formats to share.
• Organising, hosting and facilitating events, both online and in person, including workshops, discussion groups, roundtables, talks, “show and tell” demos, learning sessions, creative sessions, networking events, coworking, and other types of events.
• Monitoring community health, and spotting opportunities for improvement (and risks to be avoided).
• Reporting on community engagement metrics, assessing pain points for organisations, and developing appropriate plans to address.
• Managing the member staff onboarding and offboarding processes with appropriate staffing data management.
• Supporting members in finding information, making connections, helping each other out, including hands-on work making appropriate introductions and connections, and also creating and improving low-friction systems to support these activities.
• Supporting the OPEN team in delivery of events and activities online and offline, including major Summits (multi-track events with 100+ attendees) as well as smaller sessions.
• Setting goals for community activities, creating work plans to deliver those goals, and organising review and learning during and after key activities/time periods.
• Fostering an inclusive, friendly, and supportive community culture, appropriate for OPEN’s mission and global reach, and reflective of the skills and practices of tech/digital/data staff.
• Making it as easy as possible for community members to engage in a meaningful way enhances their impact day to day.
• Following key developments on mailing lists, Slack, social media and other forums – and inviting people and organisations to participate in relevant projects, activities and events.
• Doing unexpected stuff spontaneously – helping to organise something you’ve never done before, connecting people that you’ve never met before, or pitching something you’ve never thought of before.
• Building the OPEN network around the world – including helping to set up, and encouraging others to set up, cohorts and peer mentoring groups around specific topics.
• Developing processes and systems to help support our network, including playbooks, handbooks and governance and peer support structures (such as advisory groups), and improving these once in place.  
• Developing processes and systems to help the central OPEN team communicate with, monitor, and understand our network staff, so we can identify support opportunities.
• Continuously monitoring and analysing the needs of iniduals, teams and groups and potential cohorts, and exploring how best to support them within the open tech community.

About you

Whilst familiarity with digital campaigning and organising is useful, no specific knowledge is required. Being able to learn quickly, communicate clearly, and build community is more valuable than detailed knowledge of the tech behind our campaign work, or the campaign work itself. 

We are looking for someone self-driven, organised, and highly communicative in their work. You should be comfortable running a number of projects and activities at the same time, organising events and building and maintaining relationships. You will need to be great at empathising and engaging with community members at all levels – from junior developers to executive directors. 

You need to be digitally-savvy, comfortable with tools like Google Docs, Slack, Signal, and Zoom, and ideally experienced with (or ready to experiment with, evaluate and learn) other platforms that might help connect and support our community, such as online social spaces (Wonder, Gather, etc), creative collaboration tools (Mural, Miro, etc), and more! We’d love you to have an eye to be able to spot tools that could help and evaluate them, thinking about usability, accessibility, appropriateness for a global community with different cultures, as well as data regulations and security needs.  

You are someone who is able to hold a conversation on technologies we use and understand some basics around non-profit and advocacy technologies including:

• CRMs
• Call-To-Action Tools
• Email Marketing or Texting Tools
• Data Analytics and BI

Ideally you have a grasp on core software concepts like:

• HTML, CSS and JavaScript
• APIs and Webhooks

Experience, skills and competencies

Essential 

• At least 2 years in a community manager, community coordinator or equivalent role.
• Experience coordinating or managing a community in the tech, digital or data space, or working to support software developers, data scientists or other similar roles.
• Excellent communication and written and verbal English. Strong copywriting, editing and proofreading skills.
• Motivated to increase your knowledge of technology and digital advocacy practices
• Creating clear documentation and content, which communicates effectively to the target audience.
• Comfortable and familiar with remote work across many time zones.
• Largely self-managed / self-starter.
• Highly organised, able to keep track of multiple tasks and information sources, and find ways to usefully and effectively organise these things
• Demonstrated experience in facilitating meetings and/or workshops.
• A good capacity, enthusiasm, and empathy when communicating with a wide ersity of audiences.
• Motivated by building and sustaining quality relationships.
• Mission aligned
• Comfortable with digital language and communication tools like Google Docs, Slack, Signal, and Zoom.

Desirable

• Experience in erse, inclusive, global communities, and with those for whom English is not a primary language.
• Background knowledge of existing digital advocacy technology and practices
• Experience working with progressive or aligned-sector movement communities.
• Experienced with (or ready to experiment with, evaluate and learn) other online tools and platforms that might help connect and support our community.
• Comfortable managing data while working with spreadsheets (Google Sheets or Excel and macros) and tools such as Airtable.
• Able to curate and foster safe, inviting and inclusive spaces in our community

Working conditions

The Community Coordinator is expected to be available to host and participate in online and in person spaces across multiple time zones.

Physical requirements

Requires physical presence for events including the physical on-ground management and organising of conference and summit spaces.

Diversity and inclusion

You will receive extensive training on our tools and processes. We encourage you to apply even if you feel you do not meet all parts of the job description. 

We see ersity in identity categories and backgrounds as a strength and asset to the entire team. We are committed to providing fair pay and a healthy work culture, a collaborative work environment, opportunities for international travel, and great opportunities for learning and growth. 

We especially invite BIPoC, people with migration experience, women, trans, non-binary and queer people to apply

Compensation 

Final compensation for this position will be determined based on location, cost of living, and cost of employment in your region/country, based on OPEN’s current compensation framework. For transparency, below are indicative values for compensation in a few different cities. 

** Contractors receive an additional 20% contractor loading on top of this amount.

Benefits

• 9 day fortnight work arrangement while Covid is considered a pandemic
• Work from home subsidy of US$80
• Annual leave 23 days and 13 public holidays, 
• 12 days of sick leave & compensatory time off policies

How to apply

Please send in your applications in an email to [email protected] along with your latest resume, cover letter stating why you are interested in this position and responses to the following questions (maximum 1 page or 500 words per question) in pdf format.

• How have you measured the engagement levels of the networks or communities that you have managed in the past?
• What strategies have you used to increase traffic/engagement in the communities that you have managed?
• According to you, what skills and competencies are required to be a community coordinator?
• How might you go about getting volunteers to speak at a show and tell event, when your initial call for participation gets no response?