Community Pulse

While none of our guests for this episode have "Community Manager" in their title, these folks know a lot about building local communities. Jason and Mary chat with some of the top people behind Ignite Talks (ignitetalks.io) about building communities, drawing people together, and how to know when your plans need to pivot. Enjoy the podcast? Please take a few moments to leave us a review on iTunes and follow us on Spotify, or leave a review on one of the other many podcasting sites that we’re on! Your support means a lot to us and helps us continue to produce episodes every month. Like all things Community, this too takes a village.Special Guests: Ignite, Brady Forrest, Bryan Zug, and Megan Groves.

Jason, Mary, and PJ sit down with Kim Bannerman (@kmbannerman) and Eamon Leonard (@eamonleonard) about how to start a community. We meander down that topic while exploring the rabbit holes of burnout, dealing with difficult community members, who actually makes up a community, what separates a leader from a participant, and more. Enjoy the podcast? Please take a few moments to leave us a review on iTunes and follow us on Spotify, or leave a review on one of the other many podcasting sites that we’re on! Your support means a lot to us and helps us continue to produce episodes every month. Like all things Community, this too takes a village.Special Guests: Eamon Leonard and Kim Bannerman.

Ken Mugrage and Matt Broberg join Mary, Jason, and PJ to discuss metrics, divining the future from the past, and Jason's odd love of Fuller House! Enjoy the podcast? Please take a few moments to leave us a review on iTunes and follow us on Spotify, or leave a review on one of the other many podcasting sites that we’re on! Your support means a lot to us and helps us continue to produce episodes every month. Like all things Community, this too takes a village.Special Guests: Ken Mugrage and Matthew Broberg.

<p id="eow-description" class="">Mary and PJ get together with Jason Yee (@gitbisect), Davey Shafik (@dshafik), and David Blank-Edelman (@otterbook) to talk travel tips, packing ideas, and what you can't live without on a plane!</p> **Enjoy the podcast?** Please take a few moments to leave us a review on iTunes and follow us on Spotify, or leave a review on one of the other many podcasting sites that we’re on! Your support means a lot to us and helps us continue to produce episodes every month. Like all things Community, this too takes a village.Special Guests: David Blank-Edelman, Davey Shafik, and Jason Yee.

The return of guests Jessica Fish (@fishica) and John Willis (@botchagalupe) to discuss recognizing burnout and dealing with it. Enjoy the podcast? Please take a few moments to leave us a review on iTunes and follow us on Spotify, or leave a review on one of the other many podcasting sites that we’re on! Your support means a lot to us and helps us continue to produce episodes every month. Like all things Community, this too takes a village.Special Guests: Jessica Fish and John Willis.

Your hosts Jason Hand, Mary Thengvall, and PJ Hagerty in conversation with guests Jessica Fish and John Willis on the topic of Burnout in the DevRel community. Enjoy the podcast? Please take a few moments to leave us a review on iTunes and follow us on Spotify, or leave a review on one of the other many podcasting sites that we’re on! Your support means a lot to us and helps us continue to produce episodes every month. Like all things Community, this too takes a village.Special Guests: Jessica Fish and John Willis.

In this Halloween-ish episode of Community Pulse, PJ and Mary talk to Coraline Ada Ehmke and Ed Finkler. We explore the the two sides of the same coin that are the life of technical advocates. Enjoy the podcast? Please take a few moments to leave us a review on iTunes and follow us on Spotify, or leave a review on one of the other many podcasting sites that we’re on! Your support means a lot to us and helps us continue to produce episodes every month. Like all things Community, this too takes a village.Special Guests: Coraline Ada Ehmke and Ed Finkler.

The one where we introduce PJ Hagerty, the new guy. Jason and Mary talk about why they’ve decided to add a third person, as well as their plan for the next few episodes and their hopes for the podcast going forward. Enjoy the podcast? Please take a few moments to leave us a review on iTunes and follow us on Spotify, or leave a review on one of the other many podcasting sites that we’re on! Your support means a lot to us and helps us continue to produce episodes every month. Like all things Community, this too takes a village.

TL;DR: Given that community management is a relatively new profession, it’s difficult to know how and when to expand the department. Add to that the nebulousness around what a community professional does depending on the goals of the company, and it’s near impossible! In this episode of Community Pulse we were joined by Nathen Harvey (VP of Community Development, Chef) and Phil Leggetter (Head of Developer Relations, Nexmo) to talk about learning to scale a community role. We talk about working closely with other departments that have similar (but not the same) goals and understanding our colleagues’ day-to-day concerns, as well as the importance of communication and finding a mentor. We also delved into the murky waters of self-promotion and how to make sure you (and your team) are highly visible within the company. Lastly, we talked about the struggle of learning to step back and delegate tasks to others so you have the time to do what you need to be doing as you guide your team. Links: DevRelCon: London 2015, San Francisco 2016 Evangelist Collective Slack Group Tools: Asana: “kanban lite” -- allows you to sync with a calendar, organize tasks among a team, etc. OSS Tracker: looks after your github repos for an organization and gives you feedback and stats Zapier: an app to make all the apps talk to each other Events: ChefConf 2016: July 11-13, Austin, TX DevOpsDays DC: June 8-9, Alexandria, VA To decompress: favorite non-tech podcast: The Truth Podcast Enjoy the podcast? Please take a few moments to leave us a review on iTunes and follow us on Spotify, or leave a review on one of the other many podcasting sites that we’re on! Your support means a lot to us and helps us continue to produce episodes every month. Like all things Community, this too takes a village.Special Guests: Phil Leggetter and Nathen Harvey.

This episode is an important one, and one of our most intense to date. We covered so much in this episode that I strongly suggest you simply listen, but here's the tl;dr: Jason Yee, PJ Hagerty, and Carina C. Zona join Jason and Mary to talk through some of the prevalent struggles in community management: what our roles actually entail (and how to communicate that to the rest of the company), how we define ourselves, how to protect our roles, what we need in order to survive the day in and day out of this job that we love, and if a company decides to let their community department go, how (and when) to do that. Here are a few highlights: Who are we? We are the listeners, the connectors, the avatars of the company we represent. We're the low-bullshit communicator -- the people who are known for being honest, as well as someone the community can be honest with, and as such, we're a reflection of the company to the rest of the world. We're the oracle that's supposed to make sense of the unknown and then transmit that information to the decision-makers... easy, right? We're specialists. Just like the engineers. Just like the sales people. We're specialists. Companies need to understand this, and allow us to do the things we specialize in instead of forcing us into situations where we do things that aren't our job poorly. What do we do? There's so much "mysticism" in what we do that people get confused about what it is that we do and how we show our worth. It's essential for us to find ways to communicate what we're doing on a regular basis back to the company. Despite how it appears, we don't keep flipping hats around, choosing whichever one suits us that day... we keep adding more hats, which makes our results difficult to quantify. How do we protect ourselves? Make sure our manager has our back. We need someone to fight our battles for us, even shield us to a certain extent, so that we can do our job. In the perfect world, the person above us is the umbrella that protects us from the things going on above us, not by keeping us from knowing what we need to know in order to do our job, but allowing us to focus on our day-to-day tasks while they take care of the higher-level conversations and the fight to keep our department afloat. The question companies need to start asking isn't "Can we continue to afford to pay these people?" but "Can we afford to lose the goodwill and amount of work that these folks are putting into our community?" Check It Out: [Evangelist Collective Slack Channel](evangelistcollective.github.io) [Prompt](mhprompt.net) - looking for someone to speak about mental health in tech? we'll provide financial assistance to help you find a speaker. Vicky Brassuer's 4-part series on opensource.com re: ROI and metrics around community management Debugging Teams: Better Productivity Through Collaboration #DevRelsFTW to decompress: Fuller House (skip the first episode) Peewee's Big Holiday Enjoy the podcast? Please take a few moments to leave us a review on iTunes and follow us on Spotify, or leave a review on one of the other many podcasting sites that we’re on! Your support means a lot to us and helps us continue to produce episodes every month. Like all things Community, this too takes a village.Special Guests: Carina C. Zona and Jason Yee.