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Best practices for starting a new community from scratch
Daniel Matisto Phiri, Developer Advocate at Strapi, brings an interesting perspective here. “ I don't think people start communities per se. Communities are formed around a common struggle and then nurtured.” Most contributors echo the same sentiment. The recommendation is to start with the existing community. Look for the places that people ask for help and where they talk about the technology. Use these findings to define a mission and purpose for the community. Leandro Margulis, VP Developer Relations at UnifyID, advises that you focus on building value and trust.
Leon Stigter, Sr Product Manager at Lightbend, discusses the importance of inclusive communities. “Creating a genuinely safe and inclusive space is both hard and mandatory. New people want to join a group where they feel safe enough to ask questions and participate.”
- Avoid sales pitches and marketing messages
- Stick to content that delivers real value
- Discord was a favourite among the choice of platforms for community building
- Easy engagement and positive use of tools are the key reasons why developers choose Discord
- Stackoverflow and Slack are close favourites as well.
See where the community is already hanging out and naturally get yourself involved in it, watching and contributing. Finding what the main source of information, where is content shared, how people interact. Don't blast off your brand all over. Be a good citizen in existing communities.
When building a community from scratch, start with your existing community. This might be existing customers, open source users, people already talking about your product/ service. Start with the people who already love your technology and work with them to build a community and empower them to be influencers/ reach and welcome others into your community Mary Thengvall Don't try to build a brand new community. Find your community where they already exist and join them there. Once you've established yourself and learned from them, then you can start to bring people over into your own platform. Hannah Lee The most important thing is Docs. After that, start building a presence on StackOverflow & other social sites.
First set up a social media presence on key channels like Twitter, start outreach via these channels where you get involved in conversations relating to what you offer. Write a lot of content that gives a reason for people to try out your offering and start publishing them in external publications like DZone, InfoQ, and Hackernoon - repromote these via your social channels. Send in CFPs to external tech conferences relating to your field and try to get the word out to those audiences. Attend these events and speak to as many developers as possible. These are a few ways you can organically build a community.
I don't think people start communities per se, communities are formed around a common struggle and then nurtured. I detifying the struggle and bringing people who share it together in a systematic and orderly matter makes sense. Communities, I believe are independebt of platfroms and tryibg to limit them to that is shooting ones self in the foot. I do however believe that in choosing the spaces for a community one must make sure that it is a safe space for everyone involved - Discord today is an amazing choice for a platform becuase of it's flexibility and customisation abilities. Most importantly, it's pro-community and has amazing moderation tools. As most say, a community is only as good as the worst behavior it tolerates.
There are several platforms to build a community in 2021, most popular is having a Slack channel where interested developers can engage with companies and other community members. For code repositories, I would also leverage GitHub's Discussion feature.
1)identify what types of developers benefit from your platform and why, 2) communicate that clearly to those developers using communication platforms they already use, 3) develop close relationships with users and listen to feedback, 4) as your platform gets traction, support the users that invest time in helping other developers use your platform, and help create communities around them
That's a big question. I'd identify where our users are currently asking for help and ensure we engage there. If I find little to no results and need to start a community, I'd ensure we have a presence on StackOverflow first. Set up a Slack org for more live support next. Basically it comes down - where are our users looking for help now and where can we start meeting their needs.
Keep it simple, in terms of platforms and user experiences. Define clear vision and objectives up front. Select a platform based on your specific needs (to achieve vision/objectives). Don't sacrifice the quality of experience for existing community members, by devoting too much focus toward growing the community to more members. Prioritize your work and don't try to achieve too many things (especially when resources / team members are limited.)
To start a community from scratch you would want to find a way to gather or connect the people. We are members of communities to gather strength and exchange knowledge with one another. You want to avoid selling to your communities. If they feel that you are trying to get them to buy more of your product, members will leave. You need to help them gather and share knowledge first. As community builders you build relationships.
First, I'd do some market research with developers and see if they are interested in that type of event. I also try to lock down at least one sponsor that may be interested that I am closely networked with. As soon as that is settled, I decide on a format, and launch the event. Marketing the event and getting the word out as much as possible is important. Being consistent and clear with the event topics and style is key to building your community. Once people are familiar with the schedule and can expect to know when the next event date is, they can start scheduling it in their calendar ahead of time. Best practices: Engage with community, have a means of collaboration where conversations can continue (ex: Discord), have raffles or interactive activities to engage community members with one another, and having a clear vision statement on the purpose of the event. Things to avoid: Too much sponsor marketing using community members to benefit financially from. Charging too much for events (for in person events), too many email announcements to community members, and not giving enough time to market prior to an event. For meetups, I give it 2-3 weeks of marketing. For conferences, 4+ months.
Meet devs where they live (platform will depend on your industry, but likely locations include Twitter, GitHub, Reddit, conferences). Produce quality content to engage, NOT advertise. Be responsive.
The first thing to consider is where your developers are at. Knowing that makes it a lot easier to figure out which platforms to choose. In terms of best practices, I think that creating a genuine safe and inclusive space is both hard and mandatory. New people want to join a group where they feel safe enough to ask questions and participate. Hemachander S Understanding the developer personas, target audience based on the product / platform vision before crafting any sort of DevRel strategy.
Start helping developers around a unifying problem, technology, solution.
When starting a community from scratch, it is best to first define your mission and purpose. Doing do will allow you to focus what limited resources you may have on activities that support those goals. Perform outreach to let your audience know about the new community, be responsive to community members. Reward active participants with special perks, freebies, swag or just public acknowledgement of their involvement and expertise. Do not let your community posts wither on the vine. Encourage cooperation among community members. Plan virtual events, webinars and publish content and how-tos to keep the community interested.
Need to start with dev related content. Good to have many channels to help devs like slack, twitter, git etc
I would not start a community from scratch. I would look for where my target audience already congregates and work on building a presence there that adds value and builds trust and credibility. I would avoid being salesy and I would focus on educating and adding value to the community. Once you have reached critical mass of people using your tools or tech, then you ca build a space for them to connect specifically around your tools and tech.
t is necessary to ensure that you are fully aware of your value proposition and are able to propagate that message clearly. Once you're within that process, you must maintain constant meaningful engagement while having two-way communication with those who choose to join you. Also, not all communication starters should be initiative/event announcements. The connection needs to be made more personal. One really good platform to start new communities currently is Discord.
Understand the challenges of developers, focus on how you help them be more efficient, don’t market your products, solve the problem areas, evangelize to bring adoption of technology, be the domain expert, know the industry challenges, know the workloads and use cases, be aware of tech available