How do I community?

I am not a community building professional. There are people that can bootstrap community, that can drive engagement and tempt busy people to be talking in a Slack community about topics. I've tried. It did not work. There are things I manage to do though. I do drive a lot of community activity for Nerves, a decent bit in Elixir overall, online and in person, and I have thoughts.

I consider these recipes, default operating modes, useful stupidities, in no particular order.

Aggressively welcoming and inclusive

If people seem open to engaging, aggressively welcome them in a friendly manner. Greg Mefford used to greet everyone who joined the Nerves Slack when it was the place to be and Nerves was up and coming. It meant you were immediately talking even if you were only a little bit curious. It was actually legendary.

Lots of people will hesitate and stand around in there doorway. Shovel them in. Make it very explicit that they are welcome and that you fully expect things to be confusing or unclear at times and that you want their questions, thoughts and input.

Then of course be responsive to what comes of it. Or it wasn't actually really welcoming at all. I think people who've met me in the community circumstance would typically agree that I try to throw people as far into the community as I can as soon as possible.

This is triple important in physical events. After a day of conference you might feel like you just want to hang with the people you already know in the community and have a nice evening that way. It is very good if you are meta-aware that you may have happened into the being a "cool kids table" and whether you aggressively encourage fresh faces to join you for dinner, drinks or not does reflect on how open it is. There is a balance to be struck on how much effort you are willing to put in and how it would impact your own enjoyment of life. Typically my experience is that including new people is a win.

Default open

We are all occasionally precious about things. The more you can do in the open the better. Discussing why a Pull Request might not be a good fit. Basic moderation notes like "I'd prefer if you thread this" or "Please post these types of things over there" or open moderation questions "I feel like this won't work well in this space and I could see a few different ways to handle it". If you can be comfortable with the discomfort you are leading way more by example.

This isn't just for the moderator, leader, organizer. As a member of the community if you raise the questions in the open it invites a lot more possibility for community to build than if you DM a moderator. But even more for technical chatter about the thing you care about. If you don't contribute to the bustle of the community spaces with your chatter, who will? If you ask questions in DMs that could be public and everyone does that what fibers will we use to weave community? How do the conversations start?

This is particularly true for technical communities where the leaders are usually considered experts and people seek them out for expertise. Sometimes those conversations are in DMs because they are business proposals and industry secret type stuff. Usually it is just an abundance of caution.

The amount of Nerves stuff we don't get to hear about because the damn company only ever DM:ed Frank about it. Or even me. Oh, how I wish more of my Nerves clients would be actively engaging around what they do with Nerves. It is as often a time issue as it is a secrecy issue. I have 3 clients at the moment. Density is contributing back a fair bit of their explorations right now, which is awesome. Another one is Evercam who do share their ex_nvr code. With some luck I might be helping them also communicate a bit more what they do.

There is a slight risk to openness. As humans we'd say it takes some vulnerability. Not in the security vulnerability sense. Much more in the social, human sense. Companies tend to want to mitigate risk and the massive upside of this sharing culture is not immediately obvious. I recommend checking out Oxide & Friends for an example of being very open, very vulnerable and quite willing to be goofy in public. Some are of course hindered by legal aspects like being a publicly traded company or working in regulated sectors. Most are just being risk averse.

Spend resources you have on it

If you have resources you can make a little go a fairly long way. A few hundred dollars/euro in hardware or shirts has made a Nerves workshop pop off way more than if there wasn't something being given out. As long as the stuff is cool enough that people want to have it, use it or display it then it is very worthwhile. This is particularly useful for making physical events feel special.

Being willing to send people stickers for cool contributions or because they actively asked for it is memorable. I've been sent stuff by a peer in community spaces and it rocks. Every time.

This has scaling challenges so it works well for in-person events where you can do a bit of bulk or at least the cost is constrained by the bounds of the group. Or you gate a thing behind a contribution. The best source of this type of resources in a tech space is usually a consultancy, they tend to have some spending money and they can always point to marketing and visibility. A thank you in the invite or at the event is typically enough. Avoid sponsor logos on swag as compensation for paying the print cost if you can. Pure swag is best swag.

Ask early, ask often, answer it yourself

I've gotten worse at this, to a large extent because I have a DM with Claude as a sounding board where I can check things. This is going to be terrible for communities as they quiet down with LLMs answering a lot of questions.

You can find various threads on the Elixir Forum Nerves section or threads in the old Elixir Discord #nerves channel where I just started a question thread to share what topic I was working on. I mostly ended up answering the question myself later or eventually got some input. But I hit the question as I was working along and threw it in there because it seemed interesting enough and I expected I might get useful input.

This is a mix of showing that we are all out there doing stuff and that we don't know everything. And it becomes snipes for having people show up and share what their expertise is, or what they know. It creates interactions over time. You get to know people and you learn.

Sometimes you just get the right manual reference. I'm not in any communities that go blegh, RTFM noob at the moment. There is a balance to be struck in high-volume spaces where the time of the people answering questions is stretched thin vs spaces that are generally a bit too quiet. But opting for more communication is generally better. Keep it quality but sharing what you don't know, over and over again, is awesome.

Make spaces

A good canonical place where "everybody" in the community meets is ideal. Fragmentation is incredibly difficult to work with. The Nerves Discord becoming its own thing has been very useful. Overall Elixir being so scattered is very painful but it will not change. Then you can have some specialised varieties like in-person gathering, local meetups. I'd love to spin up a Nerves-oriented podcast to make a space for smaller and more specific conversations.

Making space for subtopics is great where they can stretch their legs without disrupting the main flow of things. Making different mediums possible is also awesome, we have a Nerves Meetup EU going now that has this lovely social breakout after the presentation and they are actually awesome. A mild flavour of conference socialising with more technical crunch because everyone is at their home setup which lets them share more real stuff.

In closing

That'll be enough for now. If you think an edited down and structured thing on this topic would be interesting and useful I might just be in a mood to work on something like that.

Apparently I turned 42 today. Go figure.

Thanks for reading, I appreciate you.