Issue 17

Welcome! 👋

Without a clear business plan and budget, a community initiative is just a list of to-dos that need to be handled every day. But we tend to think that those plans are hard to write, let alone execute, if you aren't trained as a manager or director who's accustomed to the day-in and day-out of planning on an executive level.

What would happen if instead of diving into a plan head-first, we dove back into the community? Building a plan around how to address the community's needs and concerns, and then drawing lines back to the company initiatives, can be an incredibly effective way to show business value. The research done by The Community Roundtable, presented in their State of Community Management 2018 report, agrees with me here! There are a lot of other points that line up with what have been controversial conversations on Twitter lately.

Speaking of plans... I've had a series of "best-laid plans" incidents this week, the last of which revealed why the DevRel content has been seeming rather slim for the last two weeks or so. My apologies if I missed any content along the way -- I'll be dedicating some time this week to figuring out how to turn these (not-so) lovely errors into lovely content and also getting the newsletter out at a more consistent time every Thursday!

As always, I love to hear from you! Hit reply if you've got any questions, comments, or feedback, or just want to say hey! 😁

Have a great rest of your week.
-Mary, @mary_grace

Tidbits 🕔

Why do you do DevRel?

If you’re in Community & Advocacy for any other reason besides wanting to help people, you should go find another career track. Period.
The desire & goal should never be self-serving.
The role is often a thankless job.
If you want to get into community & advocacy to avoid politics -I have some oceanfront property to sell you in Arizona.

-Kim Bannerman

Priority: Stickers

Whether or not this is meant as sarcasm, there is some truth to the fact that good stickers go a long way toward spreading the word about a new product! As Matt Broberg will tell you, there's some benefit to knowing the ROI of stickers.

DevRel programs are not a simple as printing up T-shirts and buying a booth at a conference. Much thought must be put into the stickers as they are the centerpiece of ANY successful DevRel Program.

-Cal Evans

Who should be training DevRel?

This OH'd tweet from Jason Hand got some interesting conversations started this past week via his tweet and my quote of it:

OH: "If #DevRel and evangelism were meant to be a Marketing role... Marketing would be able to train us on how to do our job instead of US coaching them how to do THEIRS"

What are your thoughts? Hit reply and let me know!

Tangibles 🤓

The State of Community Management 2018

The research from the Community Roundtable annual survey is finally live! I listened to their webinar going over the high-level information on Wednesday and it was fascinating (and validating!) to hear the results. I recommend that you set some time aside to download the report & look at the findings for yourself this week!

Start with a simple human need.

We all know that the "Build it and they will come" theory doesn't work for building communities, but what if we started communities based on an observable need? Perhaps we don't always need a long-term plan if there's a need that can be met immediately.

I see that pattern in so many strong experiences and communities: they didn’t start with a long-term plan, but just from a personal, often short-term need.

Fabian Pfortmüller talks about this more in his recent article: Many communities don’t start with a strategic plan, but a simple human need. And maybe they are better off as a result of it.

States of Participation

While not all of us have communities that are full of people actively creating content, we all deal with the spectrum of "lurkers" to "advocates."

This post from Mary Doggett dives into the different types of participation present in a variety of communities and how to interact with each.

Linkedin creates hashtag-based dynamic communities

With all of the reshuffling on various social media platforms due to communities, it's interesting to see that LinkedIn is taking a stab at this. It looks like LinkedIn groups aren't leaving anytime soon, but they've added these "hashtag-based" communities as another channel. Thoughts? Feelings? Initial feedback? I'd love to hear it!

Storytime 📚

What to do when communities go bad.

ReplyAll has long been one of my favorite podcasts, but as Venessa Paech pointed out last week, one of their latest episodes shows the dark side of communities. When things turn sour, what do you do?

Events 📆

Open Collaboration Conference CFP Closes July 1

Run concurrently with Open Source Summit Europe 2018 (Oct 22-24 in Edinburgh), the Open Collaboration Conference covers topics from Community Management to Remote Teams, Open Source Governance, Event Strategy, and more. The CFP closes July 1.

Developer Relations Events

Looking for an opportunity to connect with other community professionals in-person? There are a slew of events happening all over the world during the next few months, from Edinburgh to Seattle to Tokyo and just about everywhere in between (including online)! Take a look at the full list here and be sure to hit reply and let me know if you have other events that you'd like me to add!

Jobs 👩‍💻

Developer Relations Jobs

Job hunting? Say no more. From community lead to developer advocate and everything in between, here's your collection of Developer Relations jobs for the week.

Developer Avocados 🥑

Even Avocados Need a Plan

(Because we needed another reason to say that Developer Advocates are like Avocados, amiright?)

TL;DR: They take planning. A lot of planning. And a lot of pruning. And a lot of changes before you see fruit. Sound familiar? I thought so..