AdaCAD Community Manager

We are hiring a community manager to grow a vibrant, active, and supportive community for people who engage weaving as a form of experimentation in their research and/or art practice. Currently, our community consists of a set of users, contributors, and resources for AdaCAD, a specific piece of open-source design software we developed to support the creation of complex woven textiles.

The software supports about 500 monthly users who share their practices and communicate with the project team via Instagram, Discord, or direct email messaging. With the support of a National Science Foundation grant, we seek to increase our engagement with user and contributor communities as well as broader communities with relevant practices, but who may not identify as AdaCAD users.

We are hiring a community manager to grow a vibrant, active, and supportive community for people who engage weaving as a form of experimentation in their research and/or art practice. Currently, our community consists of a set of users, contributors, and resources for AdaCAD, a specific piece of open-source design software we developed to support the creation of complex woven textiles.

The software supports about 500 monthly users who share their practices and communicate with the project team via Instagram, Discord, or direct email messaging. With the support of a National Science Foundation grant, we seek to increase our engagement with user and contributor communities as well as broader communities with relevant practices, but who may not identify as AdaCAD users.

Our team currently consists of four people who are also faculty or PhD students at the university. We work with about 2-4 international contributors at a time to collaboratively create new features and resources for the community which we release in our software and documentation, cad.org. We also gain project feedback in conversation with a group of advisors who occupy positions in teaching, research, and industry across open-source creative code and weaving communities.

The relationships we build through the software and community often become the grounds for future research projects, which we sometimes publish in venues aligned with human-computer interaction and design research. We aim for the community manager to join our leadership team to provide extra support for outreach; engagement with our board; and providing support for our contributors that have previously exceeded our capacity.

To these ends, The Community Manager is responsible for leading strategy, developing and managing programs that will help us grow, understand, engage, and co-develop resources with our community members, contributors and advisory board. This will include organizing and leading regular governance meetings to identify key priorities and directions for the community; developing programs that meaningfully engage our community and help us understand their needs while also creating pathways for them to meaningfully participate in project governance;

and creating spaces to showcase community members within our existing landscape of websites and resources.

CU is an Equal Opportunity Employer and complies with all applicable federal, state, and local laws governing nondiscrimination in employment. We are committed to creating a workplace where all individuals are treated with respect and dignity, and we encourage individuals from all backgrounds to apply, including protected veterans and individuals with disabilities.

The community manager will work closely with the Unstable Design Lab, which is an interdisciplinary research lab within the ATLAS Institute at CU Boulder. The ATLAS Institute fosters radical creativity and invention by offering a full…