From Seed to Bloom to Compost

Lessons from Running a Community of Practice

In the world of co-design and systems innovation, we understand the power of emergence - the way in which promising innovations arise from the interactions between diverse participants. But what happens when we apply this principle not only to our design or facilitation practice, but to the very communities in which we find belonging and support as practitioners?

This question sparked the creation of CoDesignCo - a community of practice that brought together co-design practitioners from around the world to learn, share, and grow together. Over the past two years, I had the privilege of serving as the convener of this vibrant network, tending to its growth and evolution through various seasons.

In many ways, the story of CoDesignCo mirrors the life cycle of a garden. We began with the seed of an idea, planted in the fertile soil of a shared passion for creative and participatory practices. With care and cultivation, that seed sprouted and blossomed into a vibrant community, alive with the buzz of connection and collaboration.

As any gardener knows, the story doesn't end there. Gardens, like communities, go through cycles of change. CoDesignCo has now entered its own period of transformation, as we sunset the public membership model and disperse the seeds of knowledge and connection we've accumulated. It's a bittersweet moment. It’s also a generative one, ripe with insights to be harvested and carried forward.

In this post, I share some of the key lessons I learned from the experience of nurturing this community of practice - from the initial planting through the full cycle of growth, change, and composting. Whether you're looking to start or sustain your own learning network, or simply hoping to cultivate more connection and co-creation in your work world, I hope these reflections offer some insight and inspiration.

Sowing the Seeds: Establishing the Community 

CoDesignCo grew out of my co-design practitioner training program. After each 6-8 month program, I would survey participants about their experience and ask what they wanted to do next. Time and again, people expressed a strong desire to stay connected, continue learning together, and have an ongoing community for mutual support and solidarity around co-design practice. 

The initial prototype for this membership model was a low-cost subscription that offered ongoing access to the database of resources I’d created in Notion for training participants (and continue to update) and a newsletter sent every 2-3 months. Eight out of the thirteen participants in the first cohort of Co-Design Bootcamp signed up for it. 

The original seed for CoDesignCo was planted further back - in the various research and learning networks I’ve been part of over the last 20 years. Notably, I drew a lot on lessons from the Co-design Club, a private community that KA McKercher and I co-founded and co-hosted through the intense lockdowns of 2020-21.

I recognised there were many other practitioners beyond my training participants and immediate network who could benefit from this type of engaged learning community. So in 2022, I launched CoDesignCo as a paid membership service, to resource and sustain an ongoing community of practice for the emerging field of co-design.

I was excited to broaden access to my resources and services to a wider range of people. I’d hoped the subscription model would enable me to maintain a high quality of output and experience, all while reducing my workload. I also had clear values and principles I wanted this network to align with. As we said in our manifesto:

More than your usual community of practice, this is about creating new structures, knowledge and relationships to support creative and participatory ways of working. Just as we care for participants and colleagues in the work we do, we want each other to feel valued, cared for, and connected.

Tilling the Soil: Preparing the Ground for Engagement

Engaging Marina Moreno as a Community Associate to start working on research and development set the wheels in motion. Marina had been activating the community within her cohort of what was then called Co-Design Bootcamp and had a range of strategic design skills on which to draw. She was an ideal ‘end user’ to provide a member’s perspective to the development process. Building on my early concepts, she started exploring options and processes for community membership. 

We mapped out potential member journeys, inclusions and touchpoints across a range of possible platforms, considering the trade-offs between existing and more DIY software combinations. We launched softly first, to our alumni network, before opening to the public with two tiers of membership. We named these, ‘Kea’ and ‘Galah’ memberships, after the New Zealand and Australian birds.   

Marina and I gathered data to inform our engagement activities and programming through various sources, including: a question about why people were joining, on the original registration form; a participatory Welcome Event; and follow-up surveys after events and one month of membership. 

Our initial approach positioned me front-and-centre, heavily promoting my leadership and essentially extending my existing training offerings. I also positioned myself as a gatekeeper, only offering the higher level of Kea membership on invitation, hoping to ensure coherence and integrity in the network that way. A key benefit for Kea members was standalone events that repackaged content from other courses. We also invited and supported community members to lead their own events.

I eventually realised this trainer-centric and gatekeeping setup wasn’t fully aligned with cultivating a genuine community of practice where members learn from each other. I needed to decentre myself and create space for members to share their knowledge and connect peer-to-peer. I had to give people permission to actively shape CoDesignCo beyond just consuming my content.

Defining the community as a place for practitioners resonated strongly. It gave people a sense of identity around their shared work of applying and improving co-design and related practices, rather than just an abstract conceptual interest. The community became a place for motivated design practitioners and facilitators to find support and inspiration.

Tending the Garden: Nurturing Member Participation

My role evolved considerably over time. After leading most initial activities myself, last year I stepped back into more of a convening and stewarding role focused on enabling members' active participation. 

I formed a "pollinator" group of highly engaged members who took on different responsibilities based on their interests. Mackenzie Campbell helped put together our monthly newsletter. Kim Shore and Alli Edwards took the initiative to facilitate an experimental learning circle. Marina Moreno continued to organise local gatherings in Melbourne. With support from Rich Turner, Anna Jackson redesigned our members’ hub with more curated resources and toolkits, and a directory of workshop spaces. Emily Hamilton spearheaded member engagement strategy around a key event on practice development. 

A large number of members and friends from the broader sector came together in 2023 to host the Doing Design Differently tour. In this event series across Aotearoa and Australia, George Aye (co-founder, Greater Good Studio, USA) joined leading local design practitioners, academics, leaders and students in conversations and workshops focusing on how we could use design to push back against the status quo.

With new Community Associate, Jessie Upton, CoDesignCo coordinated the tour, effectively engaging over 1,200 people in five cities. This was our most coordinated marketing effort ever, where we hoped that being seen to lead relevant practitioner-focused and norm-challenging discussions would help to attract suitable members. Despite all the hours of effort we put into marketing, organising and co-hosting these events, we only had a couple of new subscriptions as a result.

There were lots of relevant connections and insights made during George’s tour. It went smoothly and could be considered a success. Yet it made me really question the viability of this whole venture.

The distributed model drawing on many contributors' strengths proved far more energising and sustainable than me trying to drive everything as a solo operator. However, I still struggled at times to fully let go of control and trust the power of self-organisation. I was concerned about the quality and integrity of our offering, responding to reasonably high expectations from some members in terms of inclusive facilitation and carefully curated content. With a paid model, I felt obligated to program and scaffold regular events that modelled best practice and constantly deliver tangible outputs.

The Tools in Our Shed: Platforms and Practices for Cultivating Connection

For those who are interested in the tools, I’ll explain here the platforms we used, and why. If you’re not building your own network, feel free to skip this section!

We’ve had lots of conversations about where best to host content and conversations. We opted not to have everything on a separate platform, like Mighty Networks or Kajabi, because people told us they don’t always go to those places with a separate log-in, even when they’re the headquarters of other online communities they belong to. 

Many designers already use Slack at work, so we chose this for our main messaging platform. A lot of our network are public and not-for-profit sector employees or consultants who are more likely to communicate by email, so we ensured that any important content or updates shared on Slack were also included in our regular newsletters. 

There were peaks and troughs in our community’s use of Slack. At times there were lively discussions happening about, for instance, the limits of asynchronous co-design and a new online facilitation tool. At other times, even when we were explicitly inviting members to comment on content in order to shape an upcoming event: crickets.

I’ve become a Notion nerd in recent years, particularly appreciating the database functions, minimalist visual style, and ability to share certain nested pages, like a wiki, with designated guests. This is where I first created a resource bank for training participants, which we’ve built out into a full member hub, with additional content such as event listings, a newsletter archive, and a workshop space directory. Even our official website, codesignco.space, was built on Notion, then made to look a bit nicer through hosting on Super.

Our online events were all hosted on Zoom. We automate a bunch of processes with Zapier and use Trello for task management. We used Typeform for pretty feedback forms. Newsletters are sent by Squarespace Campaigns, via my main website. We started out using MemberSpace to manage subscriptions but experienced so many issues, and were still paying Stripe fees to process payments, that we switched to manage these more manually only using Stripe. Unfortunately, MemberSpace continued to steal fees from some subscriptions even after I’d fully moved everything to Stripe, and neither company would take responsibility for the issue. I got incredibly frustrated spending time on these challenges, and am thankful our other platforms weren’t so painful to set up and maintain.  

Watching the Flowers Grow: Community Values and Culture

What ultimately defined CoDesignCo was the authentic, values-driven ethos that fostered a deep sense of belonging. In how we communicated and operated - from initial welcoming rituals to the care taken around the closure process - we did our best to embody the principles of participatory practice. Members have noted the genuine culture of transparency, vulnerability and generosity.

The most powerful moments of connection and meaning happened in intimate spaces like small group discussions, learning circles, and local meet-ups. Highlights included the informal ‘nooks’ I hosted, where members could ask and offer support, and simply get to know each other a bit more. These were the nodes of microsolidarity, where people could show up as their whole selves, let down their guard, and support each other. 

Weathering the Storms: Navigating Challenges and Change

Introducing paid membership created both benefits and tensions. Like a gym membership, the financial commitment motivated some (but not all) people to engage more actively and consistently, especially compared to free communities that tend to fizzle out. This resourced me to offer a consistency of service and high-quality programming.

At the same time, the consumer mindset kicked in for some who expected a steady stream of deliverables in exchange for their fees. This transactional view detracted from the co-created spirit of a community of practice (and co-design itself!).

While member subscriptions made CoDesignCo more sustainable, they did not ensure a viable business. In announcing the sunset phase, I was fairly open about these financial challenges. To put it plainly: once direct costs were paid (like payment fees, website hosting, sub-contractor hours) in the last financial year, there remained $5,000 to pay me and cover the costs of running a business. I’d spent on average a day a week working on it. I don’t have a salary or get any grants - so this was a day a week taking me away from clients and participants who value my time and expertise. 

I was also sometimes waking up in the middle of the night, worrying about certain events, or conflict between members, or (potential) criticism of not living up to our values. This wasn’t the easy venture I’d anticipated when I’d got inspired by others’ successful membership programs. 

Harvesting the Lessons: On the Membership Model

An individual, user-pays model is not ideal for this type of community infrastructure. I now believe the most promising path would be a not-for-profit partnership where organisations with an interest in strengthening the field of co-design/social design collaboratively fund stewardship of the network. I appreciate members who reached out with ideas about how to resource this model around the time I was deciding to cut my losses. I’d be happy to support others to set up something like this, but I’ve realised it’s not where I want to focus my precious energy and limited time.

So much has been based on relationships. From attracting members in the first place through to identifying people with something to share - via an event, a Slack thread, a resource to add to our database, or in a member profile. 

What would I do differently if I were creating an engagement and programming strategy now? Set up more small circles - like the peer coaching groups in my practitioners’ training and the drop-in ‘Nook’ sessions I sporadically held for CoDesignCo. This is where I witnessed people gain the most benefits from building and being in community, and why I focused our very last event on microsolidarity, encouraging departing members to form their own pods or crews. 

I wouldn’t wait for people to self-organise; I’d help them. I’d invite people to opt in for more proactive introductions - and allow more time for that. Allow time for getting to know new members. More one-on-one time. Let it be even more about relationships. Don’t expect everything to be visible. Give people permission, guidance and modelling to take ownership and initiative - don’t expect it to happen organically. 

It’s a bit ironic, but it took announcing that I was ‘sunsetting’ CoDesignCo to feel that this community of practice was truly appreciated. It was hard to know what quiet members were making of it. I tracked new, renewing and cancelling members, and paid attention to feedback received in various forms, but I didn’t know what less active members were thinking. Before I announced the closure to the public, I hadn’t heard from a few members and assumed they’d disengaged. Several popped up to thank me with heartfelt messages. 

It’s not uncommon for active members to be a minority in a group like this. Research on online communities suggests that in general:

• 1% of people in a community will be very active participants/creators

• 9% are going to be active but sporadic contributors 

• 90% are passive supporters/contributors - they may occasionally attend events and read posts, but aren’t likely to interact.

We had a much higher participation rate than that, but I had to keep reminding myself it was normal for the majority of members to mostly be “lurkers”.

I’ve realised even when adopting techniques and principles from, and following templates like, the (Social) Lean Business Canvas, Company of One, prototyping with users, and seeking continuous feedback, there are simply things you won’t know until you try them. This is obvious in hindsight, but frustrating in practice. 

Saving and Scattering Seeds: The Beauty of Sunsetting  

In a CoDesignCo event centred on ‘Saving Seeds’, member Kelly Henderson prepared the questions and facilitated the conversation that produced material for this blog post. Attendees at that event shared what they will cherish and take forth from this community (their comments are transcribed onto the notes pictured).

What members will miss or cherish most about this Community of Practice.

Ending well has been more work than hastily winding down - but it’s allowed for some really rich reflection and harvesting. I’ve also been able to support members to explore or establish other communities to suit their needs and interests. CoDesignCo Aotearoa has blossomed into Social Design Aotearoa; the Melbourne circle of CoDesignCo has opened its monthly meet-ups to non-members; and other place-based groups and identity-based crews are emerging.

Seeds that members are taking from CoDesignCo to plant elsewhere.

While CoDesignCo has now closed its gates to the public, the seeds have only just begun to scatter. I'm deeply grateful to everyone who joined with courage and generosity. Your embodiment of what an engaged community of practice can be made this not just a pragmatic learning experiment, but a nourishing one as well.

Acknowledgements: As well as Kelly Henderson’s input through the ‘Saving Seeds’ community event, this post was refined with some help from Claude.