Memorable quotes
This reality is producing conditions like never before for people across the globe to collaborate, share information, and build new things. Innovation is no longer just happening in labs
If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
This delicious cocktail of technology, connectivity, and people was creating the ability for thousands around the world to come together as a well-oiled (and often rather caffeinated) machine to generate incredible value, far beyond the capabilities of any individual.
Abayomi’s passion for the Ubuntu community wasn’t just that he could make an impact; his impact was amplified when combined with other people in the community. Do you know why Abayomi walked for hours to his local Internet café? It was because the work was meaningful for him. He could have an impact. While physically he was a kid in the middle of Africa, digitally he was a global player in a movement for a greater good. Abayomi is not alone. This desire is intrinsic to the human condition, and we can harness it in our communities.
- How can you make it easy for people to contribute and produce value?
- How can you help them contribute over and over again and build up their social capital?
- How can you make them feel welcome and intrinsic to the community while building a sense of belonging?
We are at this remarkable intersection in which technology, connectivity, and the social norms of a modern society pave the way for us to build powerful, engaging communities. This all provides a remarkable opportunity for businesses to provide and generate enormous value with a community.
In Consumer communities, while the means of participation is very simple, the assessment of merit is based on the reputation formed by showing up and taking part. Consumer communities are the foundation of communities just like Trek BBS that pull together people who share a common interest. They are relatively straightforward, with participants typically engaging in discussion around this common interest.
The Inner needs to be carefully managed to create a team environment where everyone is treated equally in how they collaborate and work. Reduce the gaps between your staff and community members as best you can.
His entire business is fueled by referrals from his excellent work. This works because (a) we often want people who deliver great products and experiences to enjoy continued success, and (b) if we can have our friends enjoy this experience, it puts us in a favorable social position in the eyes of both our friends and the provider of the product/experience.
Like Mårten, great leaders listen, learn, and guide. They don’t dominate, keep people down, or control unnecessarily. A great leader is clear in the scope of their leadership and intentions, open and transparent in their actions, but can be private and nuanced when required.
Here’s the thing: when you build anything for people, including products, services, or communities, the answers to your questions live in the heads of your audience.
Don’t see your community members and teams as pure utility and function; they should be a network of relationships that form a strong human foundation in your community.
Companies must be willing to release some control of the project to the community, or they risk ending up with a pseudo-open project.
Key to that authenticity is building a collaborative environment where your community is empowered to do great work. For this to thrive you need to think carefully about this balance of power between your company and the community.
As Jim says, “Companies can still be leaders of the project without the tight control checks typically exercised in internal projects.” He isn’t wrong. The true test of your community strategy is not making people jump through hoops to approve their work, but instead making them want to jump through hoops to help them, you, and the rest of the community be successful.
if you are not clear in what value your audience wants and how you can deliver it quickly and reliably for them, you risk a lot of work and a lot of failure. If we can (a) clearly see how we can contribute value, and (b) clearly see how we can receive value, we have the foundation for a great community.
Danger, Will Robinson! The mistake many organizations make when thinking about value is to become naval-gazing, selfish teenagers. What can my organization get out of the community? What can these community members do for us? How can it help our business? This is a fast track to a boring community.
The role of empathy and selflessness has proven time and time again to both build relationships and repair them. It is the bedrock of great leadership throughout the ages.
For example, most members would be happy to produce content, material, or technology that adds value to the broader community (e.g., help for other users), but they are unlikely to produce material that is only going to benefit you and your business (e.g., providing support as part of your paid support service). This is a consistent pattern I see: community members want to serve the community, of which your organization is one cog in the machine.
We are building human systems, and we need to ensure these systems are founded on a realistic understanding of how humans actually think and behave.
Communities are fundamentally driven by active participation. This participation can be as simple as consuming information and joining discussions on a forum or as advanced as producing code that is integrated into a shared software project. The ways in which we find, motivate, reward, and engage people in a forum, and the ways in which we find, motivate, reward and engage people who write code is entirely different.
General calls for volunteers to provide help often demonstrate limited results, but reaching out to specific individuals to ask them to do specific things often works well. Importantly though, the members are only likely to help if the work is (a) interesting to them, and (b) benefits the broader community.
Companies historically were command-and-control environments; the people at the top handed down decisions to the worker bees who followed them dutifully. This is a model that is eroding more every day. Successful modern businesses are instead seeking to strike the right balance of leadership and autonomy—it maps much more intuitively to our instinctual human drivers and psychology.
There needed to be a clear place for new community members to start, an understanding of how we keep them engaged and moving forward, and clarity on what they can get out of the experience. was in a bit of a pickle. I recommended she fix her problem by zooming out and focusing on an end-to-end community experience. There needed to be a clear place for new community members to start, an understanding of how we keep them engaged and moving forward, and clarity on what they can get out of the experience.
This is the crux of great experiences. Great experiences produce an appetite for value, set expectations, and get you there easily with gratifying results. If we don’t design a clear, logical, satisfying journey, we will lose people along the way. We need to take the same approach to building communities. Don’t treat your community as a loose collection of websites and content. Think of it as a carefully glued-together chronological journey that has a beginning, middle,
My friend Stephen Walli, a veteran in the technology world, once shared with me that in a few companies he worked at in the ’90s, a key metric for the success of a software product was the “ten-minute rule”: how long it took the user to do something simple with the product from the minute the shrink-wrap was taken off the box. (The goal was, unsurprisingly, within ten minutes.) This metric was fundamentally dependent on the user understanding (a) the value the software could deliver, and (b) how to experience that value as quickly as possible.
Why Participate? Put yourself in their position. Why should they take their time away from their family, friends, and other interests to participate in your community?
When a new community member wanders up to the start of the on-ramp, they typically progress step-by-step through six stages. Setup Tools. When they decide they want to participate, people need to set up the necessary tools to get started contributing something tangible (such as an article, an answer to a question, or a piece of code). This should be as simple and pain-free as possible. In one community I saw, it took more than two hours to complete this step. This just isn’t acceptable.
Build Skills. Now that they have the motivation and tools ready, members need to learn how to participate. This again varies depending on the persona. Provide them with the basics of how to get started in delivering value.
Tangible Engagement. At this point in the Community On-Ramp Model they are ready to do something. Provide them with guidance on what they can specifically help with. Which questions need answering? Which events need organizing? Which features need building? How can they advocate for your community? Provide simple ways to connect your members with problems that need solving. Don’t desert them; help them figure out what value to add. Many new community members don’t know how to get started.
Many engineering communities—such as Kubernetes, Babel, Nextcloud, and React Native—point new developers at simple bug reports they can start with (often tagged with “good first issue”).
Many people new to communities are worried about looking stupid: make asking questions a normal part of the community experience. In the beginning your team will need to field most of the answers to these questions, but as your community grows, other community members will start to help too.
Tangible Validation. Finally, when they have contributed something of value, celebrate it. As you can see, there is a lot involved going through the onboarding process—setting up tools, learning skills, producing value. When they successfully get through it, show your appreciation. This can be as simple as a personal email from you thanking them, or as complex as a full rewards system and gamification.
Again, put yourself in their position. Imagine you make your first contribution to a community and a senior member of the community or company reaches out and pats you on the back. Unless your heart is carved out of ice, this feels good. This will increase the chance you contribute again. Before you know it, participating will seem like second nature.
Typically, when you join a community there is no manager and no specific person responsible for your success. You, the member, are responsible for your success. As such, your community should be as simple and intuitive as possible from the get-go so members can benefit from it immediately.
In a perfect world, every community member would have a mentor to guide them. Since that won’t scale, there are three approaches I recommend to get people up and running:
- Self-direction provides the right set of choices to your community members, where they can always find new things to do and accomplish, all of their own volition.
- Peer support provides ways in which members can support and guide one another.
- Incentivization is where you provide specific incentives and rewards that keep people moving forward. Again, in video games this often happens when players are rewarded with trophies, ingame equipment, or new features as they complete various challenges.
As a general rule, for every one hundred community members, seventy will be Casual, thirty will be Regulars, and one will be Core. Our ultimate goal is to wire together the right mixture of self-direction, peer review, and incentivization to keep them progressing from Casual to Regular, and then from Regular to Core. Not everyone will want to ultimately get to Core, but you should build an environment that supports this transition if they choose to make it. Let’s take a look at each of these different segments.
Core members are your major leaguers. They provide a foundation to your community. You know them by name, and you have enormous respect for the sheer amount of time and devotion they provide to the community. You and others think of them as rock stars and worry from time to time what would happen if they left.Listen to them. Learn from them. Many community managers make the mistake of treating all their community members in a subservient role. Don’t make this mistake with your Core members. Be vulnerable and ask for their help and guidance; you will benefit from it.
The idea here is simple: if you place a regular series of incentives and rewards along the journey from Casual to Regular to Core, and those incentives reward positive contributions and behavior, it naturally keeps people moving forward.
In a community there are seven primary critical dimensions that I see in most cases (not in any priority order):
- Growth. How many people are joining your community? How is the growth changing over different time periods?
- Retention. Of those people who join the community, how many are sticking around and participating
- Community ↔ Community Engagement. How are people collaborating together? Are they engaging and working together?
- Company ↔ Community Engagement. How effectively are your staff engaging with the community?
- Delivery. Is the community delivering results within that audience persona? For example, are Support personas answering questions, are Developers producing code, and are Content Creators producing useful content? Is the community delivering value in your campaigns and initiatives?
- Attendance. How well attended are your in-person events, online webinars, campaigns, and other initiatives?
- Efficiency. How efficient are your various processes such as your onboarding, collaboration processes, conflict resolution, and other
I have noticed consistently with clients that when there are clearly measurable KPIs, their teams perform better. Most people need concrete goals. Make sure you get your KPIs right.
This is all about listing specific, measurable KPIs. “One thousand community members signed up within a year” can get a yes/no answer. So can “Support on-ramp is completed on average within two hours.” There are three key areas in which you need to track success:
- Productive Participation. At the center of a strong community are productive, happy, community members. We have already defined our Community Value Proposition and Audience Personas. How do we ensure our target personas are accomplishing that value?
- Getting S#!t Done (Delivery and Execution). We have already broken our Community Value Proposition down into our Big Rocks and then started pulling together our Quarterly Delivery Plan. How do we ensure our strategy is working well and getting delivered?
- Organizational “Oomph.” Finally, the success of your community will be directly related to how well you bake community strategy and engagement skills into your organization. It is essential we track this organizational skills development.
Cultures are hard to understand and build. They are formed from a set of norms that are repeated and become adopted by the broader group. As such, we want to build a set of cultural norms in your community but ensure that they are adopted, embraced, and evolved by your community, not merely shoved down their throats.
Few people have all of these ingredients. Prioritize finding a people person who has a willingness to grow. These are intrinsic human instincts that are difficult to teach. I once hired someone who primarily had great domain expertise but just couldn’t engage effectively with people. Sadly, I had to let him go.
Red Hat contributes to dozens of open-source communities in areas where we don’t have commercial products. We do this because these are areas important to the open-source communities in which we are active, and the work needs to be done. We understand that there is value in contributing whether or not there is a direct quid pro quo. It’s part of what’s made us successful.
Departments are usually on board in the early ideation phase of a community strategy, but things often break down when they need to execute. This is why we created our Big Rocks earlier and our more detailed Quarterly Delivery Plan. These two documents crisply define what we are going to do, which results we want to see, and who ultimately has responsibility for delivery.
Most people naturally don’t ask for help, so schedule regular check-ins to see how they are doing and regularly tap them on the shoulder privately to see how they are doing personally and if you can help.
In that book I discovered that Linux, and the broader open-source ecosystem, was built by a global community of mostly volunteers. Sure, the tech was interesting, but it was this global-community-working-together bit that really switched a lightbulb on in my mind. I decided back then, in my barely pubescent teenage peanut of a brain, that I was going to make it my life’s mission to understand every nuance of how all of this works, and to help other people to see and harness the value of these communities too.
People are remarkable. We all have an amazing capacity for kindness, counsel, and courage, and when we are surrounded by those with similar traits, we become better. The human condition is not a fearful, angry, divided one. It is a social and supportive one. We thrive together.
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