How to herd cats.
By Kris Coppieters, Jun 2025.
Pre-meeting questionnaire: https://forms.gle/vW2cRphLitXeuVaK6
The meeting time is below; I’ve converted it to a few different time zones for convenience.
🇳🇿 New Zealand: 06:00-07:00 NZST, Friday, June 27
🇺🇸 US Pacific Coast: 11:00 AM-12:00 PM PDT, Thursday, June 26
🇺🇸 US East Coast: 2:00 PM-3:00 PM EDT, Thursday, June 26
🇪🇺 Brussels, Europe: 8:00 PM-9:00 PM CEST, Thursday, June 26
🇮🇳 India: 11:30 PM-12:30 AM IST, Thursday-Friday, June 26-27
Post-meeting questionnaire: https://forms.gle/aW2ZFX2TVHjmHUbj6
TL;DR: A Hub for Collective Solutions
Got an idea that could help our community?
Log into the collective’s website and post a proposal.
Other members can browse, volunteer, gather resources, and form teams around shared challenges, whether it’s YouTube content, conference booth sharing, vendor advocacy, building resilience against breaking updates, business support…
We’re the hub; you do the work. No bureaucracy, no bosses, just a platform to connect motivated people who want to effect change together.
My Role as Facilitator
To be clear: I see myself as a facilitator/crank-starter.
For 20 years, we’ve operated as a nameless “swarm” of developer, scripters, automators, and companies with overlapping interests and challenges. As individuals and small entities, we have limited leverage to influence the systems and vendors we depend on.
My goal is simple: define a collaborative process that harnesses our collective power to tackle shared challenges.
I’m not here to dictate which issues we solve. That’s for the collective to decide. I’m just crank-starting the process.
What follows is a proposal for a collaborative approach. I am trying to minimize administrative overheads and red tape and endless meetings.
Carrying this initiative should be possible by everyone contributing just a little bit, and should not take up too much time from any individual.
From past experience, I know it is very easy to get mired into process and procedure and lose sight of the goal. I am trying to avoid that.
I feel it is possible to make this work. In fact, it has already been working in a less formal way for the last 20 years.
– Joint projects have been started through our informal network
– We have some influence on Adobe when it comes to features and bug fixes
– There is https://docsforadobe.dev/
– We have a Slack
– We have a Slack archive
– We have been physically getting together at a yearly Creative Developers Summit
… and there’s more
Full disclosure: I have been using Claude.ai to help me restructure various pages on this web site. I started by writing up my ideas and thoughts, then asked Claude to clean them up (I tend to ramble a bit). Then I reviewed what it came up with, and made sure it still matched what I was meaning to say.
Learnings from Disaster Response
My approach draws from experience with the NZ Red Cross IT&T Emergency Response Unit. I was deployed with my team after the Christchurch and Nepal earthquakes.
When global disasters strike, dozens of organizations respond: Red Cross, UN, Doctors Without Borders, World Vision…
Without coordination, there would be duplicate efforts and conflict.
The humanitarian community uses the “Cluster Approach”. There are specialized working groups that coordinate independent organizations around specific problem areas (health, shelter, logistics, etc.) while maintaining their operational independence.
At a lower level, within our IT&T team, we used SMEAC; this is a planning methodology borrowed from the military. Before any task, we run through a process to define:
- Situation: Current context and challenges
- Mission: Specific task to accomplish
- Execution: Who does what, in what order
- Admin & Logistics: Resources needed, reporting structure
- Command & Signal: Team leadership and communication
This can be done very quickly if need be.
I see my role in the CCC as similar to what my Red Cross team did in disaster response: we made communication possible.
We set up radios, repeaters, Wifi, satellite connections, satphones… to make sure all the separate aid initiatives could co-exist, co-operate, communicate and be effective.
Strategic Thinking and Big-Picture Initiatives
While much of this document focuses on structure and process, it’s important to emphasize: strategic, big-picture thinking is not only welcome, it’s essential.
This framework isn’t here to constrain ambition. It’s here to provide a flexible and transparent way to move bold ideas into action, without bottlenecks, gatekeeping, or hierarchy.
If you have a strong vision, whether it’s increasing our influence with Adobe or Canva, creating a unified public presence, launching business accelerators, or redefining how creative automation is seen in the industry, you’re encouraged to frame it as an initiative or as a project/operation.
Examples might include:
- A Strategy & Advocacy initiative to help us position ourselves as industry thought leaders
- A CCC for Enterprise project aimed at offering coordinated services to Fortune 500 companies
- A Business Readiness operation supporting members with training in marketing, pricing, licensing, and negotiation
This model exists to enable this kind of leadership-by-example. The only request is to frame your vision in a way that invites others to engage, adapt, and collaborate.
Strategic urgency isn’t being ignored, it’s being given a sustainable runway. By translating bold goals into shared initiatives, we maximize participation, resilience, and impact.
Proposed CCC Process
What follows is somewhat boring reading, but it is actually quite simple.
I’ll show how it currently works during the meeting. It’s meant to be a simple and quick process…
1. Pain Point/Issue/Initiative Identification
Anyone, either inside or outside the collective, can identify issues/pain point affecting our community, or initiatives that can benefit the community.
These get documented and discussed.
Initiatives are not projects or operations. They are collections used to group projects and operations.
Example initiatives:
- YouTube presence (create interest and provide valuable information)
- Stability (protect us and our customers against rogue, unexpected updates by vendors)
- Advocacy (make vendors take notice)
- Marketing (identifying and sizing market, become visible to prospects, work out value propositions, work out offers they cannot refuse)
- Trade Shows and Conferences (e.g. shared booth space, speaking engagements…)
- Bug Tracking (avoid ‘black hole’ bug reports that disappear)
- Code Review (get an extra few eyes on the project, sanity checking)
- Developer Tech Support (better tech support)
- Pricing (how to price your tools or your time and effort…)
- Meetups (social interaction, what’s new…)
- Legacy (i.e. attracting young blood, handing over projects…)
2. Project/Operation Formation
Associated with an initiative, any member of the collective can propose a project or an operation by creating a SMEAC brief.
Simply grab the template and add a WordPress page: all members of the collective have a personal login that gives access to the private WordPress pages.
Projects have predefined desired outcomes and finite timelines. Choose ‘Project’ for finite goals with clear completion criteria.
Operations are similar to projects, but cover ongoing activities. Choose ‘Operation’ for ongoing services or activities that continue indefinitely.
Feel free to strip some or all of the template. The template is there as a guide, not as a straitjacket.
Remember, I used Claude.ai to generate those, and you can throw it all away and start from scratch if you prefer.
Situation: What’s the current problem/context?
Mission: What specific outcome will improve the situation?
Execution: Step-by-step plan and role assignments
Admin & Logistics: Required resources, timeline, success metrics
Command & Signal: Team lead, progress tracking, communication methods
Example project:
- Monthly YouTube Video Try-Out
Initiative: YouTube Channel
Situation: We want to create interesting, dynamic content for the YouTube channel
Mission: Trying out the idea by producing and publishing five videos. We record a Teams session where one of the collective’s members interviews another about something interesting that they can speak to. It could be their product, their current project, their methodology, their favourite programming language, font types,…
Execution: We try out the concept by creating 5 YouTube recordings back-to-back and release them week by week. We use MSTeams and screen sharing with people’s faces visible in small in-frame rectangles. The videos are about 5 minutes long.
We use the collective to ping the videos to ‘up’ the number of views. If all of our members run through the movie a few times, that will make the movie be more elegible by the YouTube algorithm.
Admin and Logistics: We need to find a few of our collective members who are good at interviewing others. See if anyone has experience being a YouTuber who can help us avoid beginner mistakes.
Command and Signal: Team Lead: Kris. Progress Tracking: we do a trial of 5 movies, and release them over 5 weeks.
We report back viewing numbers to the collective after 5 weeks, plus any learnings (what to do/what not to do).
After that we can either shelve the project, or plan the next batch of videos.
List of people interested in being interviewed (add your email address):…
List of people interested in the making of the videos (presenter, editor, sound…)
3. Team Assembly
Once a project or operation brief is posted, collective members can:
- Indicate whether/how it could benefit them (or not).
- Volunteer to join the team
- Commit specific resources or expertise
Once a team is assembled, a team lead is chosen.
Being a team lead is about facilitating, not about authority. A team lead is more akin to a scrum master than a manager: it is their role to keep an eye on the big picture and guide the team to success.
4. Project Lifecycle
A project needs:
- Clear deliverables and success criteria
- Estimated duration (weeks/months/years)
- Defined start and completion milestones
If insufficient team members volunteer, the project/operation is shelved until conditions change.
The Goal
Transform our informal swarm into an organized force that can tackle challenges no individual could solve alone, while still maintaining the flexibility and autonomy that makes us effective.
Core Principles
Hands-Off Facilitation
The collective provides the platform, and process teams manage themselves.
There is no central control, no enforced standards, no mandatory reporting.
If projects succeed, great. If they stall or fail, that’s part of the natural process.
Individual Autonomy
- Team formation: Anyone can start a project when they feel capable
- Resource allocation: Teams decide their own commitments and priorities
- Quality control: Teams define their own success criteria
- Commercial opportunities: Teams can spin off ventures, form companies, call it quits, setup an official charity, form a legal entity, restrict their membership… whatever works
Platform Features
- WordPress hub: Hierarchical project organization (Pain Point → Project/Operation → Updates)
- Project categories: Planning, In Progress, Completed, Stalled
- Operation categories: Planning, Active, Inactive
- Trusted membership: New members need to apply by introducing themselves with an extensive CV/bio, and require vouching by two existing members
- Private workspace: Member-only access protects against bots and freeloaders
- Regular meetings: Highlight new initiatives and gauge interest
What The Collective Is Not Offering
This isn’t project management, quality assurance, or conflict resolution.
We’re not enforcing deadlines, mediating disputes, or guaranteeing outcomes.
We’re simply creating the space and structure for self-organizing teams to form around shared challenges.
Benefits and Potential Challenges
Why This “Hands-Off” Approach Works
Low Overhead
No bureaucracy to maintain. No committees, approval processes, or administrative overhead. The collective provides the platform, and that’s it. Teams do the work they choose to do. It is easy to avoid inadvertent duplication of effort because we can keep track of what projects are already active.
Natural Filtering
Market forces determine which projects succeed. Viable projects attract committed team members. Projects that don’t gain traction simply don’t proceed, hence no resources wasted on forced initiatives.
Entrepreneurial Freedom
Teams maintain complete autonomy over their work. Successful projects can evolve into commercial ventures, spin-off companies, or individual opportunities. No collective ownership or control over outcomes.
Sustainable Leadership
Minimal ongoing administrative burden means the collective can function without burning out organizers. The platform facilitates; it doesn’t manage.
Potential Challenges We Should Acknowledge
Discovery Friction
Success depends on people actively browsing the WordPress site and engaging with project briefs. Unlike centralized assignment, participation requires individual initiative and ongoing attention.
Mitigation: Regular online meetings to highlight new projects and probe interest to help with project/team matching. Slack and email updates for major developments.
Initial Momentum Critical
The first few projects set expectations for the entire collective. Early failures could discourage participation, while early successes demonstrate value and attract more engagement.
Mitigation: Start with achievable projects that have clear, measurable outcomes. Focus on “quick wins” initially to build confidence in the process.
Ghost Town Risk
If early projects stall without visible progress, the platform could become inactive.
Unlike managed initiatives, there’s no central authority pushing projects forward.
Mitigation: Transparent project status tracking. Clear deadlines and status categories (New, In Progress, Completed, Stalled) help set expectations about natural project lifecycle. Regular collective meetings with status updates.
Even failed projects provide valuable information to help future attempts avoid pitfalls.
Why These Challenges Are Acceptable
Self-Selecting Community
People who thrive in this environment are exactly the independent, self-motivated developers we want to work with. Those who need more structure may not be a good fit—and that’s okay.
Failure Is Learning
Stalled projects provide valuable information about what works and what doesn’t. Each attempt teaches the collective something about effective collaboration and realistic scope.
Antifragile Design
The collective gets stronger from project failures, not weaker. Failed projects don’t damage the platform or other teams. They just clear the way for better approaches.
Scalable Success
Successful projects demonstrate the model works, attracting more participation. The platform can support dozens of simultaneous projects without additional overhead.
The goal isn’t to eliminate all challenges. Instead, it’s to build a system robust enough to handle them gracefully while enabling the kind of independent, innovative work our community does best.