Community Board Evaporative Cooling

The day-to-day administrative excellence of a CB is vital for them to attract and keep talent, and this must be taken more seriously. We can do it!

Social evaporative cooling is a well-observed phenomenon in communities.¹ It uses the metaphor of evaporation (like in sweat) to explain the steady outflow of talent from groups. Let’s take a look at an example:

Let’s say you have a community board. It’s well run, makes great use of human capital in its community district, does creative things that achieve political results, and it uses modern technology. More than that: it’s not just about addressing problems reactively, it proactively does good things! This kind of organization will be able to attract and retain talent.

But let’s say that a few key people leave that community board, and it starts to function less well. Maybe the website becomes out of date. Maybe the chair starts to enforce parliamentary procedure less effectively, so that people speak too long, too much, and too poorly. This will quickly become frustrating to a few members who demand the previous standards of operation—and they’ll leave.

This might not seem like a big deal at first, but those members with higher standards that just left will make the average standards of the remaining board members even lower. And then another group of board members who weren’t bothered before are bothered now—and they’ll leave.

You can see where this process ends up. Standards plummet over time, and you’re left with two groups of people: those with very low standards, and those who are suffering an immense amount trying to raise standards. The latter group tends to be very small compared to the former.

Social evaporative cooling is why administrative excellence matters

I’ve been working on a version of my community board bylaws survey for a while, and some people have asked me why the quality and accessibility of bylaws matters. “They’re just community boards” is the attitude.

They matter because low standards in an organization always come to kill you in the end.

And I’m not just working on an evaluation of CB bylaws, but a broad examination of their entire administrative apparatuses. The better a CB runs, the more it can attract and retain talent, and the better it can serve its community district.

Administrative excellence and good governance are inseparable.

Besides bylaws, community boards can cause evaporative cooling by defaulting on any of these things:

• Parliamentary procedure. Either the chair doesn’t wield it well, the members don’t know how it actually works and what power they have, or both. You can tell that social evaporative cooling has hit your board hard if it tolerates a few members speaking far too much, and everyone else sits in silence on the call or in the room.

• Technology. If you’re using Webex instead of Zoom, you’re telling talent to stay away from your community board. If your website is outdated, same story. How’s your social media game? What record-keeping system do you use for your resolutions, vote counts, and more? Today, all of these things can be done using great, often free off-the-shelf software. If you insist on using paper files for records when something like Airtable is available, don’t be surprised when your CB members leave and are frustrated. You are not doing a good job!

• Social meetups. Community boards are notoriously not representative of their communities, especially because they can’t attract or retain younger members (see above).² If you want to do that, and build a sense of united purpose with your board, they need to meet each other outside of their formal duties, and those meetings have to actually be good events and parties.

What to do about a community board that has lost talent to evaporative cooling

If your community board seems like a hellish or boring place to hang out, and many of them often are (this isn’t a value judgement, just an observation), you might resign yourself to ever fixing them.

If you’re on the board, you’ll leave and never look back. If you’re a citizen, you’ll never apply. If you’re a borough president or a city council member in charge of appointing members to the board, you’ll struggle to find applicants who can run the board well.

OR!

You can come have a fun time with me. You can get your friends together and literally just build everything your CB needs, and run it yourself. These are interesting problems to solve, and fun solutions to build.

In a self-governing society, citizens don’t just write off their community boards! They get together and make them epic.³

1. As far as I know, evaporative cooling applied to group dynamics first came from this 2007 post on LessWrong.

2. There are tons of articles like these, going back a long time, highlighting the various ways that community boards aren’t representative of their community districts. Although some borough presidents are making progress in this area, CBs remain unrepresentative.

3. This process requires people to know that CBs exist, which most don’t in NYC, so there are some harder prerequisites to solve here, but that’s literally what I do.