If you don’t know what to do, pick up a chair

Jon Banafato shared his older blog post Stacking Chairs in Mastodon the other day.

“Stacking chairs”, taken literally, is what it sounds like. You know those stackable plastic and metal chairs that they have in your local library’s community room or similar space? Grab one, add it to the top of the stack.

It’s a great concept. Throughout my community career, I’ve used it a lot. I’ve told people that my superpower is carrying chairs. One of the alumni groups for a community I used to hang out in is called Tuolinkantajat (lit. chair carriers) for this same reason.

Jon does an excellent job of saying everything I wanted to say on the topic so I’ll mostly refer you to his post.

I want to highlight another piece from that post:

It’s not particularly glamorous. There are plenty of exciting community volunteer roles that carry prestige with them, but this isn’t something that would end up on someone’s résumé.

In many communities, there are positions that can be glamorous for personal glory. They can often attract people who care not for the community but for using the community as a lever to gain personal advantage.

Carrying or stacking chairs is the opposite of that. It’s the type of contribution that is serving the community first and foremost.

I used to work as a community manager for a local entrepreneurship community. We had this co-working space from which were moving to a new place. I scheduled a Community Day for people involved in the community to come together to carry stuff.

I get there in the morning a bit before the scheduled starting time. All of the tables and chairs had been carried next to the doors, ready to be hauled into a van for moving. They carried the chairs both literally and metaphorically for the community. That was a big moment I knew I was involved with the right people.

In PyCon CZ 2023 in Prague, after the talks were over, we had a board game night. As soon as the last lightning talk finished, people started stacking the chairs away from the main area to make space for tables for gaming. It was an amazing community experience to witness.

The title is paraphrasing Ben Grimm from MCU’s Fantastic Four where he says “My father used to say: if you don’t know what to do, pick a shovel.” Chairs are our shovels.