Lovely post that matches many of my experiences (admittedly with communities not directly related to a product). A few notes of my own:<p>> <i>At the start, having just two channels was fantastic. First, it reduced the community ghost town effect by concentrating all activity into those two places.</i><p>I'm surprised to hear people keep re-learning this lesson. Back when web forums were popular, this was basically the one big mistake I kept seeing people make. Way too much compartmentalization.<p>> <i>After [being shown a project in private] a few times, I proposed a new channel: [...] We didn’t try to force the community’s hand.</i><p>I think this could and should be generalized into "Avoid surprises". Communities generally do not react well to change with no announcement. Even if you know that a measure is strictly necessary (e.g. because your platform provider changed its terms of service in an impactful way), first give a heads up before you make a change. It goes a long way for public opinion. It's tempting not to, especially as time goes on and you feel like you have people's trust, but it's essential to ask first wherever possible.
The article doesn’t seem to mention how they got their very first community members. I’ll go out on a limb and guess that they got their first 10-100 users through posts like this on social media
To some extent, this is a chicken and egg problem -- how to get enough people to join so that other people will join -- and one way they solved it kind of falls under "backwards compatibility." They started on Slack in part because their audience was already on Slack all day, every day.<p>Second, they started with just two channels. Not only did this concentrate traffic, it reduced cognitive load on new members trying to figure out where to say a thing and worrying if they were in the right channel.<p>One good way to outright kill conversations is to have lots of low traffic channels and then fuss at people for discussing a thing "in the wrong channel" because that's where conversation happened to break out and insisting they move their discussion "to the appropriate channel" when there is no actual compelling reason for it. (There can be compelling reasons to ask people to do things a particular way, such as privacy, information security or age segregation protecting young people from explicit content. But those rarely are the reason this gets asked.)<p><i>before we created the channel, folks would share their creations with me directly via DM. That was amazing, but this approach didn’t help others in the community, since the conversation was 1:1 in private.<p>After that happened a few times, I proposed a new channel:</i><p>This makes me wonder what preceded that.<p>Why were people sending him direct messages? Were they only sending them to him or were other team members getting similar messages? If they were only direct messaging him, why is that? What was he doing that fostered that?<p><i>In my experience, creating a sense of psychological safety is key to facilitating many-to-many conversations.<p>One great way to do that is to help members feel like they know who’s on the other side of those usernames in Slack, and that those people are generally nice.</i><p>A thing you have more control over: Setting the example of how to effectively interact in a way that fosters safety for everyone.<p>This was likely done without realizing it. If you know how to have a successful career, you likely know how to relate to the public. If you are writing a guide to kickstarting a community, you likely know a lot about relating to the public effectively.<p>That involves a lot of baked in assumptions and best practices that you may no longer consciously think too much about. The community then looks to you to set the example for how to do this dance.<p><i>Ahead of the call, we sent registrants a $25 gift card to a food delivery app as a way to share the celebration with the community — a virtual “snacks on us,” if you will.</i><p>This is brilliant because it connects the real world and virtual world so effectively. You have a real world impact on people you connect with online and a lot of people seem to think this isn't true. A lot of people seem to think the two things are more separate than they are.<p>This is a brilliant example of how you can send digital goods -- gift cards -- with real world impact -- ordering food to be delivered. Though even just talking with people online is a real experience with real world impact.
I stopped reading at “ some of the best minds in DevRel”
Jesus fucking Christ, not everything is a “DevOps” wording clone.<p>Edit: Finished the article, good insights. However can we stop the Dev_ and _Ops BS?
Please and thank you.