Building a Thriving Developer Community Through Connection and Passion

Demetrios Brinkmann created one of the biggest and most vibrant developer communities that I've seen, MLOps Community. He shares learnings on how he did that and what he'd do differently. Incredible resource for dev tool community managers and founders.

Links

• Demetrios Brinkmann LinkedIn
• MLOps Community

Takeaways

• Get to know people: when people join just talk to them, get to know them, do a 15-minute chat to learn what they want to get from the community, what their expertise is, where they can chip in etc.

• Tag and introduce members: Figure out who knows about what and then @ tag them in the conversations to engage. On top of that intro/connect people who you think could benefit from connecting in DMs.

• Seeding conversations: ask people you spoke to, to ask questions in channels. Sharing good articles could help show the community is not dead but doesn’t really grow engagement.

• Don’t let questions get unanswered: ask people in DMs to answer, tag people etc. Or try and share resources you saw on the subject so as not to leave people hanging

• Share targeted resources: when you get to know members, either manually, or through surveys, share super targetted resources with them. Courses, blogs, podcasts, etc when you have things that are exactly what they want.

• Build community members up. You see a blog post from someone from community, share it in the slack yourself and start the discussion. Then you can invite them to meetups/conferences, talks, podcast. Whatever social capital you have to give.

• Gating community: making sure that folks who get into the community will add/get value from it. Discussions are shaped by the people who are in it so if you have vendors/beginners those are the conversations you’ll see.

• Seeding community: you can start by inviting selected people through LinkedIn/Twitter. I liked the outreach message: “Hey I’ve spent the last 40 days locked in my house [COVID], and wanted to do something productive with my life. And I started this community. If you want to join, let me know”

• Creating a podcast opens doors: high-influence people take calls with you when it is a podcast when they may not have talked to you otherwise

• Be-shameless channel: for some practitioners, it is one of the most valuable channels. It keeps people in the loop on what is happening in the space. And vendor articles or webinars are actually appreciated by some people as the vendors spend 24/7 working with practitioners in the space on their little piece. Plus if there is no be-shameless you will get spam in intro or general.

• Managing sponsors is tricky: at a certain scale, you want to get sponsors to be able to fund the infrastructure and people to keep it vibrant. But you don’t want to sell your soul to vendors and sell your members as leads to them.

• Community of craft vs small exclusive meetups: you need to live this, this is a huge effort, with content, engagement, etc. It may be smarter to build small exclusive and targeted in-person meetups. Quality over quantity. 20-30 people, not recorded, super focused conversations. And the CTA after that meetup is to join the community Slack.

Chapters

• 00:00 Starting the MLOps Community
• 08:51 Values and Culture in the Community
• 15:25 Connecting People and Recognizing Their Work
• 19:05 Maintaining Engagement and Quality Discussions
• 27:40 Building the Community During COVID
• 33:22 Commitment to the Community
• 38:41 Strategies for connecting with new community members
• 42:58 Onboarding new community members and gathering insights
• 46:51 Understanding the different reasons people join the community
• 57:26 The importance of engagement and feedback in community building
• 01:03:51 Creating channels and fostering engagement in the community
• 01:07:40 The Importance of Active Channels and Local Champions
• 01:09:39 The Formation of Local Groups and Meetups
• 01:12:00 Managing Vendors and Sponsors in Community Building
• 01:16:51 The Power of Exclusive In-Person Events