If You Build It, They Won’t Come

Everyone wants to create a community and invite their users and prospects to join, but few people understand that communities create themselves. The best communities exist because the users of a product or service banded together to make it happen, not because the company stood up a community site and invited people to start talking.

Transcript

1. If You Build It They Won’t Come
   Amanda Folson
   Developer Advocate @ GitLab
   @AmbassadorAwsum
   

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2. Who Am I?
   ● Developer Advocate at GitLab
   ● Have done community work
   professionally for several years now
   ● Professional conference attendee and
   tinkerer
   

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3. What is a
   community?
   1.
   a group of people living in the same
   place or having a particular
   characteristic in common.
   2.
   a feeling of fellowship with others, as
   a result of sharing common attitudes,
   interests, and goals.
   

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4. Why community?
   

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5. From a User Perspective
   ● To receive support
   ● To request features
   ● To find like-minded people
   ● To belong
   

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6. From a Company Perspective
   ● Inform about products/projects
   ● Give support
   ● Receive feedback
   ● Source additional contributors
   ● Fostering goodwill
   

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7. Where it gets tricky...
   ● People will make their
   own communities
   ● You can’t control these
   ○ BUT they can be
   guided
   ● Growth is organic
   ● Companies will set up a
   community and it won’t
   grow
   OR
   ● It grows and they screw it
   up
   

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8. Mistakes
   ● People create communities for the sake of creating
   communities
   ● No defined goals
   ● No plans to nurture growth
   ● Community is only used as sales funnel
   

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9. Bridging the Gap
   ● How can you find/create and nurture your community?
   ● Community likely exists
   ● Don’t clobber it
   

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10. Community Managers
    ● More of a cheerleader than a manager
    ● Lead by example
    ● Needs to be trusted
    ● Not always an official position
    ● Facilitates communication between parties
    ● Avoid bureaucracy
    

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11. Make Communication Easy
    

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12. Conflict
    ● With enough people (i.e. more than one) conflict will happen
    ● Response is crucial
    ● We all know bad PR when we see it
    ● Happens for a variety of reasons
    

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13. Conflict Resolution
    ● Don’t take sides
    ● Facilitate civil discourse
    ● Negotiate!
    ● Be open
    ● DO NOT get aggressive
    

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14. Avoiding Conflict
    ● Adopt clear communication practices
    ● Solicit feedback frequently
    ● Be visible
    ● Be approachable
    ● Be empathetic
    

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15. A Word About Codes of Conduct
    ● One size doesn’t fit all
    ● One might not be needed or wanted
    ● Pitch one and allow for collaboration
    

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16. Never Stop Improving
    ● Always solicit feedback
    ○ Even if it’s hard to hear
    ● Surveys
    ○ Offer anonymity
    

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17. Metrics
    ● Post counts aren’t a good metric
    ○ Post frequency is better
    ● Look to social media
    ● Data is everywhere
    ○ Time from PR to merge
    ○ Current number of developers/rate of growth
    ○ Number of downloads
    

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18. Surveys
    ● Great for quick feedback
    ● Low barrier to feedback
    ● Note that scales of 1-10 can be interpreted differently
    

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19. Support
    ● Be thinking about how to support the community
    ● What resources are needed?
    ● What is the commitment?
    ● What are the goals?
    

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20. How will we bring people in?
    ● People need to be incentivized
    ● They seek out communities because they need/want
    something
    ● They need to belong
    ● They need to have purpose
    ● They need to feel welcome/invited
    

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21. Thank you!
    Amanda Folson - Developer Advocate at GitLab
    amanda@gitlab.com
    @AmbassadorAwsum
    

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