A community playbook is a collection of principles, recipes, answers and other valuable information that helps people run a community or some part of it.
It should be very practical with step-by-step guidelines that document how the community is being run. When a problem arises, anyone should be able to pick up the playbook, find the solution and fix it. Or if someone doesn’t know what to do or what has been agreed upon, the playbook should be the updated single source of truth from which answers can be found.
And for everything that doesn’t have a direct answer in the playbook, the principles and values should help guide towards a good solution.
Its idea is to
- Document the values, principles and specific actions to avoid accumulation of silent knowledge
- To help new people run parts of the whole with little previous experience and knowledge
They are especially handy when people in the community’s organising core team change over time or when a crisis happens.