Re-engaging communities after a break

Rebecca Marshburn: Welcome to the second edition of 2023's DevRel Round Table brought to you by the one and only as you see here, hopefully likely on your left screen. Matthew Revell, the head of hoopy and of developer relations.com. And of these DevRel roundtables and the reason why we all get to get together to talk about DevRel topics, I am Matthew's co-host Rebecca Marshburn, the head of the Uncommon Community at Common Room, which is the intelligent community growth platform that helps you build better developer communities, respond to issues and bugs faster, and really drive and measure that impact of your developer community work on the business itself. But that's enough about me. Matthew, would you like to say hello before I introduce the theme of today's panel?

Matthew Revell:* Yeah, for sure. Well, as you said, I'm Matthew Revell. I work at Hoopy and thank you to Common Room for sponsoring this episode of DevRel Roundtable and really I'm just excited to get stuck in and talk to the people we've got with us as guests day.

Rebecca Marshburn: Alright, well without further ado, so everyone knows that the theme is as we introduce these expert guests, today's theme is re-engaging communities after a break. So we thought it would be timely now that it's at the end of January, 2023, people came back after the first, second week of January. That first week is always pretty much a blur and you're starting to be like, how do I do this job? And what was I doing and what were my key goals? And now that it is a different year, are those goals the same or different? So there's a lot of ways that each person's experiencing that in their jobs and that includes our community members and ourselves within our roles and how we're serving their roles and what their changing goals are, perhaps after a break. So that's a holiday break, for example. But their seasonality in terms of summers, in terms of children, there's all sorts of breaks in all parts of the world.

And if you're in the northern hemisphere or southern hemisphere, that might be a little different. So as we go through seasonality, as different communities experience different breaks, different seasonality, how do we engage those communities and how do we meet our community members where they are when they want to be there with what they need at that time? So without any more discussion from me, we'll let our expert guests begin to take it away. Would you like to introduce our first guest, Matthew?

Matthew Revell:* I would absolutely love to welcome our first guest who is Liz Moy. Welcome, Liz. Hi, how are you doing?

Liz Moy: Hey, I'm doing well. How are you? Both?

Matthew Revell:* Very well, thanks.

Liz Moy: Yeah, I'm

Rebecca Marshburn: Good. Thank you. Good to have you.

Liz Moy: So good to be here. When you were just talking about how it can be so difficult just to get back into the swing of things, I was like, wow, I feel that because I moved flats and started a new job in January, so I am personally in that mode of what is going on, what are we doing? So this definitely came at a great time for me and I'm happy to be here just to chat with you all and the other guests. So I'm really looking forward to it.

Matthew Revell:* Great. Well, so Liz, before we bring on anyone else, let's just give a bit of background to you. So you started your career as a software engineer at Disney, which to us, well to me in the UK sounds very exotic. Well, you're in the UK as well, but it sounds very exciting. But then you went over to become an evangelist at Twilio. So after being an engineer yourself, you wanted to help other developers to build things, and I think that's a path that a lot of Devra people take. But then recently, as you said, you started a new job and that's an ever vault where you're helping developers to build secure solutions. Is that right?

Liz Moy: Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's a platform that allows folks to use an API to encrypt and decrypt data and process data and a functions environment. So yeah, it's pretty early days for getting the community going there. So I'm also extremely excited to chat with both of you and the other people on the podcast or the episode here just to learn some more strategies because I definitely have some experience from my days at Disney when I was involved in some of our women in tech programmes and serving as internal developer relations there for a bit. And then being an evangelist full-time at Twilio. Definitely got to see some things that I think worked and some things that didn't, and really open to trying some new things and just learning what other folks in the community are doing.

Matthew Revell:* Cool. And before we move on, you did warn us we might see your fluffy tuxedo cat Sanderson in the background of some calls, maybe not today, you've got a background, but we'll keep a lookout. So yeah,

Liz Moy: He loves to pop up and

Rebecca Marshburn: Say hello. So we'll see if he does today. Our next guest is Brian King, who's a senior community manager at Couchbase, focused on building a strong developer community there. I'm not going to give away what Couchbase does because I'd love for Brian to extract it, but before he does, Brian started at Community in Community management at Mozilla back in 2012, and then after that built communities at both Toptal, Eclipse ,and more. We're super excited to have him and his expertise represented here. Hello, Brian.

Brian King: I'm not going to go on too much about Couchbase and what we do. Please check if they're at couchbase. com. We are one of the leading NoSQL slash cloud database platforms. Yes, we're trying to build a strong developer community. Previously I've worked at organisations, you mentioned Mozilla, I worked at the Eclipse Foundation as well. Open source is very much in my DNA. I worked on the community at Toptal, one of the leading talent networks in the world.

We had a strong community there as well. And I also am an ex software developer, so before I pivoted to community management, I worked for a number of companies. So like all DevRel people, I say I like to under think I understand developers, but I don't think anybody ever really truly does.

Matthew Revell:* Cool. Well thanks Brian. Let's bring on our final guest, who is Jules Dam g Jules, welcome to DevRel Roundtable. Thank you for joining us.

Jules Damji: Well, thank you for having me. I'm delighted to be among esteem guests, Rebecca and Brian to be sharing what we've been passionately doing for over a decade. So yeah, truly excited to be here. So

Matthew Revell:* Jules, you're a lead developer advocate at any scale, but I think before that people would've seen you around the Apache Spark and Apache Hadoop communities, not least of all, because you are working at Databricks and Hortonworks. So you've been around the big data streaming world for some time, and I think you're joining us from California today. Is that right?

Jules Damji: That's right. San Francisco Bay area.

Matthew Revell:* Let's start with a basic foundational question. Are community-wide post break engagement, dips a thing? Do people really kind of trail off after a summer or a new year break? Does that actually happen in your experience?

Jules Damji: Do you want me to go first?

Matthew Revell:* Sure thing. Yeah.

Jules Damji: Yeah, I think the various ways to look at that, I think it's common When you come from a small break such as a holiday break in the summer or winter vacation, there tends to be a little bit of a dip because of the fact that people are on a holiday on the summer, Europe takes off. So we hardly have any engagement during those three months. So it's not uncommon to do that even after the winter break. We do tend to see a dip, but I think the more dip that people now worry about is the fact that we have to think about when you have global events, global traumatic events like recession or the pandemic and pandemic has been an event that has actually completely shifted not only the communities around the world who engage electronically but also in person, but schools, universities, other church communities or other organisations where people actually get together.

So I think this is where we actually send the deep, and this is we actually send the behavioural change. So this is where we actually are facing most challenges is how do we actually get the engagement back to pre covid or to pre-recession. And is it really fair? I mean I would pose the question to you guys is that is it really fair to compare the engagement we had pre covid and right now, should the expectations be very different, should we located differently? I think that's where the challenge is. I should rely because comparing pre and post is a bit comparing apple and oranges. Do you compare the people's behaviour and pre-war post recession and previous recess post covid and pre covid, is it really fair to do that? Are your OKRs and KPIs going to be exactly the same?

So I think those are the challenging moments for advocates and community manager around the world to reevaluate, re strategize and reprioritize what are the things you can actually do to bring some numbers up, but not necessarily exactly the same numbers. That's how I sort of grapple with this.

Liz Moy: Yeah, I really agree with you there. I think one of the things that I am grappling with right now and trying to figure out is we shifted, especially in terms of events. I did a lot of developer events in my previous role and now that I'm starting this new role, I'm looking at what that looks like and should we be doing that and how much time should we spending doing that? And I got so used to doing developer events virtually, and people really liked it because for a period of time that was a major form of interaction. So especially in the early days of the height of the pandemic, people were showing up to events and they were excited and they wanted to participate. And I think now there's this shift in trying to figure out, well, there's people that still really like that virtual style and want to continue that way, but then there's folks who would prefer to be in person and how do you bridge that gap? How do you give both groups an equally valuable experience or do they need to be two separate things? So I totally agree with post 2020, it's really changed the way that we look at a lot of different things.

Brian King: Yes, I would agree. Things have changed dramatically in community and endeavour around the world and it certainly is an apples and oranges situation. I think there are other types of events within a community, within a company, within et cetera that you will see lulls. So somewhere I have seen for example is after a major campaign where you've asked a lot of your community and perhaps there's a little bit of community burnout. So bit of town time during that time I would argue is good. Give your community some time to process, move on to the next thing. I think after major product releases, which is very closely tied to that, there's a lot to talk about after a product release, but then maybe there isn't much to talk about after that or isn't much to work on in terms of code. And then I think a question that you should always be asking, is your community really interested in what you're doing?

So are the projects available for them to work on? Is your product even compelling? So that's something, a continuous conversation you have, you should have internally, but you should also have at your community.

Rebecca Marshburn: I have a couple of follow-ups. So one is for you Jules, and then one is for you Brian, specifically on this topic. Jules, you had hinted that there are certain OKRs, KPIs, goals, whatever we want to call them, that you have seen that you have changed, let's say pre pandemic and post right after such a big seismic experience for everyone in the world. So I'd love to understand a little bit more about what those goals are for you. And then Brian, you had mentioned that let's say after early big campaign, maybe your community members are like, man, we're tired. But also I'm curious on the other side, is it also a tiredness that comes from us performing the roles, right as developer advocates, developer relations leaders, community managers. Is it our community members that need to take a break or is it also our how we work as the leaders or hosts of those communities also affect the potential dips in those communities? So both maybe meaty questions or not.

Jules, I'll pass it back to you and then Brian if you have anything to add, we'd love to hear it.

Jules Damji: I think those are good questions because we tend to measure, well the first thing, the challenging part about de relations, going back to the early days, I think Matthew has spoken that at conferences, how do you actually measure the return on investment? That's always a perennial question, right? It's a long-term lead. It's a long-term investment. It's not like the relations note about closing deals, about opening minds. And so how do you actually tell your stakeholders to measure that? And we just have to manage expectations because I do remember when I was at Hortonwork was Databricks for about six years and whenever I would have a meetup where I would've a workshop or I would've some sort of an in-person event, I wouldn't even have to worry about, I mean, 200 people would show up or 50 people would show up at an in-house or I would've a race spark Saturday and I would have 150 show up.

I didn't actually have to worry about it. Now the post is that should I expect 200 people and should I tell to my stakeholders that we having this particular event, I guarantee that you're going to have 200 people who are going to sign up of those 50 people we show up will have a hundred people come in. My NPS score is going to be 60 or 70 above. How do we actually mitigate or how do we lower the priorities? I think that's where, so in terms of my KPIs now, if I'm going to have an event, I'm going to be, I'll manage the expectation by saying I'm not going to have a house full of people because I think people are still reluctant to come inhouse. They might do virtually and the times are kind of different. So I think managing those KPIs and managing those expectations is an important bit about it because once you actually try to attain or try to reach those KPIs and they actually want pre pandemic, you're going to be disappointed and your stakeholders are going to disappointed.

So one, managing your expectations and making sure that you lower expectations, but expect that over a period of time by doing different strategies. And I think the part of the conversation we're having today is what are some of the things you can actually do to somehow start bringing up to certain level, but you're probably not going to attain the same level because people's behaviour have, this has sort of become like a social science programme. How do you change people's attitude who are now entrenched in the sofa, having a pint and then looking at a meetup and if the topic is boring, they're going to leave. Or if they're at in-person, meetup exit started is slightly different if you're embarrassed walking out in the middle of a talk. But I think people's behaviour will actually change. So how do you actually shift that? How do we entice them? And there are different ways we can actually try to do that.

So managing expectations, making sure that you don't over promise and then disappointed when the turnup is very low.

Rebecca Marshburn: Yeah, it's probably also an idea of, like you said, it's not just sheer numbers. It's about, okay, what is the quality of how interested these people are in the product that came? And then how do we help build those relationships to make them stronger relationships that help amplify product and deeper knowledge, empower other users, maybe become champions in the future, but it's like, I forget who said it, probably a VC would rather have 10 people that love you than a hundred people that like you. So then it's also how do measure we measure that as well.

Jules Damji: Yeah, yeah. Ology versus quantity. I think that's a huge thing.

Rebecca Marshburn: Thank you for diving in. Brian, any thoughts on the, is it also our members and also us, and then how do we help navigate those relationships between how we approach our work?

Brian King: Yeah, definitely. If I understand your question correctly, it's like is community burnout more reflection of how we do our work rather than community members? Absolutely. There's ways to mitigate against it, of course, how you structure your work, how you structure your projects, how you structure your ask, right? I think kind of structuring it, for example in a, let's just call it a buffet where community members can come in and pick and choose when and what they want to contribute to. So I remember for example, back when I was working for Mozilla, I don't know if any of you remember, but browser releases used to be like every one or two years and they were major events. I remember the last one was Firefox four and there was a huge download campaign and lots of activities around that. And that eventually changed to kind of a six week release model where eventually we wouldn't even talk about releases.

They would just be automatic updates that appeared in your browser. So there was no release events anymore. So what I think that did that kind of focused the mind of various different teams, both engineering teams, localization teams and so on, to find ways to structure their contribution projects to be more sustainable and kind of more on a steady flow over time. So yeah, absolutely. It's all about planning how you structure.

Jules Damji: I think Brian talked about a very important thing you actually raised about what are some of the, I think what Brian, Emily has talked about, what are some of the things that we should actually worry about that interest people? And just to take the conversation slightly differently or introduce the whole idea behind all of us are committee managers, all our advocates, what are the three engaging pillars of the community that actually makes them successful? One is value, right? Successful, useful communities create value. And Brian talked about the value and Rebecca mentioned about the value. Liz mentioned about that as well. I think the value and what is the value over here? Values are by saying creating value.

They create a content which other people can actually use. It could be blog posts, it could be social tweets that amplify your particular product. Let's say they're talking about rain a certain way, talking about how I did something in an SQ way using base or have I actually wrote a particular application that uses the API. Those are the things that community create as a value. So we actually have to make sure that those value are perpetuated and are amplified in enhanced, and these are the assets. This could be blocked. So successful, I mean useful communities create value. So that's one pillar.

Value is an important part of it. The second piece is engagement. And I think this is the topic about engagement. Engage communities kind of forced to relationships that go beyond value.

These are relationships where people come to your forum or they come to the community because there's an umbrella of psychological safety. They want to seek help, they want to ask questions without being reprimanded because some people can be very nasty when they ask a certain question. So I think they feel that their relationship, and the third one is an important part about the shared vision, right? Successful communities sort of fostering Facilit shared vision. Why would you join a community if you don't believe in the vision, why would you join a political party if you don't embrace the vision? So I think that those are the three important pillars and if you keep on providing the value and if you keep on making sure that the communities will actually come there, have the ability to engage and learn something, and we make sure that the shared vision is articulated and amplified, I think those things are the three important parts of any community. And if you focus on those three areas, whether you provide content, whether you provide through engagement, whether you provide through in-house events, if you keep those three ingredients in mind, I think you're going to have a good overall participation. What do you guys think?

Matthew Revell:* It makes sense to me. I mean I'd love to pass over to Liz because you mentioned your experience of the women in tech group at Disney and obviously you've over the years of your career, what are the things that you are tracking to measure those peaks and troughs in a community's engagement?

Liz Moy: Yeah, that's a great question. I would say I love surveys. Personally. I think everybody at my last job probably got annoyed with me saying we should send a survey for this. But that's a really big one that I like to use. If it's possible just to survey the community to ask what are you up to? When is your busy season? I think that I worked with quite a number of developers that are what I would call professional developers.

They work for a company and a lot of times they would be using our product for a specific reason for a project that they were working on. And a lot of times you would see tonnes of API calls or just tonnes of activity from them when they were building out a proof of concept. And then as soon as that was done, it would drop off and then maybe if they were going to implement it in production, then it would go back up again.

I think there's that side of the house of actual usage, but then there's also that question of life events and just things going on and activities. And another really eyeopening experience for me personally was I started out my career in the states and then I moved over to the UK about a year and a half ago and I realised that summertime here is a very difficult time to do anything. A lot of folks are away on holiday and enjoying it as they should be. And so a lot of times you can just assume that that time's going to be pretty quiet. And actually going into autumn is sometimes a really nice time to engage because people are getting back into the swing of things. They're trying to crank out anything that they need to do before the year comes to an end. So I think there's those two sides of it that I think of with why are they using the product and what do they need to be using it for and how does that relate to engagement versus life events and things that might be going on just for a lot of people in the world.

Matthew Revell:* Does anyone have any leading indicators that enable you to predict a dip in engagement?

Jules Damji: Oh, good question. I think, well, for one thing, definitely recession is definitely one bit. Layoffs is another one. We've seen the tech industry actually going through a fair amount of turmoil. So we'll begin to see people dropping out. We'll begin to see less engagement, we'll see less slack messages, we'll see less tweets, maybe we'll see more frustrated tweets. So maybe reflection of those things. So I think those are any events which actually coming up a shift in a business or economic circumstances are one indication. I think I

Brian King: Go ahead. Sorry Julie. I think that's also an opportunity for many companies and communities, like they say, the best time to start a business is during a recession. I think also the best time to really kickstart your community is during a recession as well, right? Because I think the temptation for a lot of companies during a tech downturn is to say, let's get rid of the deral community teams and let's hire more sales. We need more money. But if you plant the seeds at this time and you build a strong community and you put good content out there, that will really, I think set you up for future

Jules Damji: Success. Yeah, I think you're right. I mean it is, any disaster actually creates an opportunity as well as Brian, you pointed out, if you can actually recreate the content and if you can reengage and provide the value, the important thing is that what is it that you can actually provide that brings people back? So if people has been laid off and they want to have some skills to be developed, what would I do to make sure that they would actually use Ray as a platform to be able to write distributed applications or what are some of the things that actually provide in Couchbase that people actually can do their applications? So I think there's are the things, what is the value that actually actually provide that will enable them and give them the agents to go and get another job. I think that's the bit that you talked about is the good opportunity for them to re-skill themselves. Yeah, definitely.

Rebecca Marshburn: I'd love to ask if either the three of you have created content like that, does that mean that you shift from how to use this to do your role into mentorship types of events or into networking types of events or have I see you nodding? I'm wondering if there's a particular time that you may have used to that shifting. Okay, how do we address the moment and then what is the right content to engage our community members in the moment they're in?

Jules Damji: I think historically before the pandemic meetups was sort of one way because developers like to hang out the water hole or meetups. This is where the os of knowledge are, and that's where they come in with the elephants and deep their trunk and juice of knowledge. But the format was the same. Two peak speakers would come up, they would broadcast this thing, we would have a good chat, we would've gear pizza, and then people would actually hang out in the pandemic area. That wasn't possible. You couldn't actually have the one-to-one interaction. So you had to be sort of more creative in how you actually go about changing the form and format and the modality of how you actually create the content, deliver, convey it and engage. And so you have to change the format.

So you just can't have two speakers will come all night.

You might want to say, okay, I'm going to have a lightning talk from a community guide and they will main speaker to do that, do that probably maybe once a month, then change the format. We're going to have a live q and a, I'm going to bring all my commuters for Ray or the open source product, and you can ask them anything you actually want about a particular release feature that is completely different because now it's actually more interactive or I would have, let's do own live coding today because it changes the format. And then this again, facilitates what Brian was talking about, people who actually want to build their skills after recession and they don't know about how to actually use Couchbase. They would actually come and start writing or doing live coding sessions. So I think changing the form and format is one way to make sure that you actually keep on engaging.

And that's one way to, because you're going to attract different people. You're going to have advanced or intermediate developers who want to come and listen to what a committee is going to talk about in this particular feature, in this particular aspect of that. Or you actually might a beginner who would say, how do I actually get started? How to things, which is opposed to this is what the feature does and this is how the use case is going to be. So I think changing the form into modality, asking the community what is it that you actually want to learn? What is it you actually want to hear? And making sure that they actually provide the feedback and making sure that they're part and part of this event they are coming to is an important ingredient. And I think that that's what sort of keeps the momentum going.

Rebecca Marshburn: Liz, I imagine you've run a survey on this.

Liz Moy: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Well, so I mean most sort of DevRel folks, I'm sure we would always do NPS surveys after each event. And I think that I was really lucky because people would often provide very good feedback. And so it really gave us a nice set of data points to look at and see, okay, people, this has come up a number of times. How can we adjust for this?

Or even we ran a pretty strong robust webinars programme throughout the pandemic that was kind of a shift from in-person workshops to more virtual webinars. And I think that was also really helpful to hear from the community. We love that web RTC one and then we were like, okay, well let's run it again in a few more time zones or this one didn't really get that great of attendance, so maybe we don't focus on SMS that this time or things like that. So I think the point also about focusing on what do people in the community actually need and want? I think that there's a lot of really amazing content right now for folks that are early in career. And so finding ways to bolster that in addition to still making sure, as Jules was saying, that you are kind of giving that level to the more intermediate or advanced folks in addition. And then just finding ways to get the content out, which is also just a big DevRel topic. I think generally for some reason when we were chatting about this, I was thinking of a couple different newsletters that I am subscribed to, and one of them, the author every week has a little problem that you have to solve, lead code style kind quick one-liner that you solve.

And I think stuff like that too is just so nice to keep people engaged as programmers.

Brian King: Definitely. Yeah, I think coding challenges for developers, I think it's always a good time to put them out to keep folks engaged. And I kind of feel like now would be a great time to really push if your community has an academy or educational efforts and certifications to really, really push them out there. They provide great value to people.

Jules Damji: I think Liz touched on a very important point, which is time zones. We used to actually be very biassed about certain time zones, Pacific, California, and I think having these events at different time zones gives you a larger outreach. And I think that that has become more of a reality now post covid because people still feel that they can attend a particular event virtually and the comforts of their office or in the comforts of the gym or the comforts of their pub. Matthew, no offence, but yeah, I think that's an important part. So when you're planning all these community live events, which is different from your slack and your discourse because that's 24 7, you do want to keep the other audience, the global audience in mind, and especially in the open source community. And I think Brian would attest to that is you got global contributors and you got global committee all around the place, and so you want be able to reach them and make the conversation as

Rebecca Marshburn: Well. It sounds like we do think dips are a real thing and they might be based on all sorts of things, seasonality, holidays, world impacting events or national impacting events depending on what that event is. And it does sound like we feel like that maybe there are some indicators that you could say, okay, I imagine I can see that there might be a dip in my community, but we might be able to change modality or medium or content style to adjust so that the community still engages but might be engaging with different types of content depending on where they're at and what they need at that time. And so then we also talked a little bit about setting the right expectations with your stakeholders so that there's still a deep bridge of communication being built between what's happening in the community and how that might impact the business next month, six months from now, next year.

Because those two things still need to be tied together in terms of what we're doing in our business job roles. So Brian, I'd love to hear from you or maybe you kick us off, if there's any particular way that you've found a lot of success in communicating with cross-functional stakeholders about like, Hey, here's where we're at, here's what we're going to see in the community and here's what we can expect for your team, or here's what I'm going to do in terms of being a community manager and how that might look to what we're doing in marketing, what it might look to what we're doing in sales. Certainly what it would look to what we're doing in product and engineering.

Brian King: I think I've kind of been fortunate enough to be in relatively thriving open source communities where there were very compelling projects and there was very active community members wanting to work on those projects. I think in my current role at Couchbase, it's certainly different. I think a lot of our community are enterprise developers working either in our customers or potential prospects or those just trying out our technologies to see if they're a good fit for 'em. You mentioned marketing. I think community activities always have to, it's a two-way street. They have to be tied into GTM activities, so constantly in touch with product and marketing and saying, Hey, this is where we think communities should fit, but we also want to hear from you and where you think community should fit.

We can certainly try and predict lulls, we can look at various tools. If we're seeing a drop off, for example, discord engagement, that might mean something. All tools out there. Jules mentioned beat up, there's forum process, there's a lot of indicators you can look at. But yeah, it's just obviously about communication and just setting expectations and just say, look, we don't really see a set of active contributors for this particular activity right now. So just factor that into your plans. Constant communication. And also as Jules mentioned earlier as well, it's a long game.

They might not be seeing any community activity right now or I think Jules was talking in the context of sales, but it's a long play. It's about building that community over time and just setting those expectations and say, Hey, we're building towards something, even if it's just more people entering our community, which will just have that snowball effect to kind of lift all boats. Use another cliched analogy there. Rising tide lift all boats. So just saying, look, you may not benefit from it now, but you will later.

Matthew Revell:* And I think there are different types of community. So already today we've discussed open source contributed communities versus end user developer communities where people are essentially consuming a service or a product rather than contributing. And then there's new communities where everyone's maybe hasn't established who they are in the community, but they're perhaps a bit more excited, whereas then you, we've all seen the older communities where people are a little bit jaded and maybe not quite as welcoming to outsiders and so on. So I wonder, do any of you see differences in the ebb and flow of engagement from community type to community type?

Jules Damji: Yeah, that's a good question because I think that as you say, what happens with the older communities, if you look at, for example, the Apache Foundation community, it's a global community. It's got thousands of products underneath. People have been pmcs for the longest time if you get the Kubernetes communities, but of one of the biggest ones as well. You do have people who initially when they actually started the fervour, the passion is there for over a period of time. The stars somehow fade away. But I think we have to be careful between how they fade away are they're failing away because scepticism, cynicism or the fading of scepticism, scepticism is healthy in any community. You want to have some people who are sceptic about a particular feature or a particular issue that you're actually raising because you want to do ask questions. You don't want challenge people.

I think we have to worry about the cynicism bit of it where as Matthew pointed out, how do you actually deal with people who are Jed? How do you actually bring them in? I think bringing them in is the important bit is you want to make sure that the people you identified who are stars of the community and you begin to see them less jaded. How do you actually amplify them? So they keep on contributing, they keep on sharing their wealth of knowledge they've accumulate over the time. I think that's just amplification. You have to just make sure that the people who you think are incredible assets who are providing to the community value, you keep them amplified, you keep them recognised, you bring them into the community and keep on engaging them so that way the scepticism is healthy, but the cynicism is somehow is what you want to counter. And this is the way I actually seeing where people who have been in the community for a long time, so I've seen this before, but what about this?

What about that? I think that's an important bit.

Matthew Revell:* So Liz, your work has been more in the end user, the consumer of APIs, for example, communities as opposed to the contributor, let's build some open source project together type of community. I guess in my own experience, one of the challenges with that sort of community is that in some ways people have less of a stake in what's going on because they are consumers. So how do you build the engagement model with people to even out those dips?

Liz Moy: Yeah, that's a great question also. Yeah, I'm currently trying to learn as much about the open source community as I can. So I'm really happy that Brian and Jules are both here because gotten a lot from the things that you've shared so far in that area. I think one of the biggest benefits to that long game that people have been talking about is that even if someone doesn't use the API right now, that doesn't mean that they won't in four years or five years. I think that, and one of the things that I say a lot in my role is I am really happy that I don't have to be a salesperson because if someone's telling me about what they're building and I don't think that whatever company I might be working for is the best choice, then I'll tell them that I don't think it's the best choice and I'm allowed to do that.

And part of that is because I want people to feel like they can trust what we say and that we're a credible source and that then down the line if they do need it or maybe they need something else that we offer, they'll be like, oh wait, I had that great experience with X product I I'm going to go back and look at it again. So I think keeping that idea in mind that even if someone learns about your product at a student hackathon, that doesn't mean to say that they won't use it in a job that they get couple years down the line or at a startup that they might want to start. So I think trying to just think about it from a bigger picture perspective rather than a short-term one can be really helpful.

Brian King: User communities can be extremely challenging and one of the main reasons is because, so for developers can be very fickle in that they kind of tend to jump platforms and jump technologies to the new hotness. So if you're not providing a compelling experience for them, they're just going to look to the next thing. I think the main way to provide a compelling experience, obviously you need to have a vibrant community, but also just have a rock solid product, make sure the product continues to do what they want it to do and meets their business needs or whatever their application building needs.

Jules Damji: Yeah, I mean just to add on what Liz and Brian touched on a very salient point, which is I think there's a difference between the open source community and the user and community because one is you have access to the source. If I can't find a solution in the community, I'll just go and look at the source and I'll figure it out. And people who are comfortable with that will do that. We would least point it out was how do I actually use this particular API? And what Brian pointed out, you give them a dev develop experience that is frictionless because there's an inverse relation between friction and fusion. It's going to take me five hours to figure out how am I going to use this secure API the least talking about as opposed to I can just go to the documentation and I can search and I can navigate and I can find good examples and I can find good code.

And I can find not only beginner examples, but intimate examples and entire use cases. You have this wealth of information available to you that makes develop experience easier. They'll stick with, I'll just go to every world because I know there's a gallery of examples. I know that I can ask a question and somebody is going to answer me within five minutes or within 24 hours. I think that's an important bit, and I think Brian pointed out is the user experience is important. Once you introduce friction, you're going to lose people. As developers, they want to solve the problem right away. And if it's going to take me five hours or five minutes, I'm going to jump to the next product.

And I think that's an important bit about it.

Rebecca Marshburn: Yeah, I think you all are hitting the trifecta, right? Brian, you said of rock solid product, Joels, you're basically saying rock solid documentation or ways for me to help understand what I need to be doing. And then Liz, the joke I was going to make, but then I totally cut Brian off, was that you're talking about rock solid trust and a rock solid community host or developer advocate. And I was going to say, you're like the perfect stylist where you, you wear this API and you're like, how's it look? And you're like, that's not flattering for you. And so that's rock solid trust. That's the stylist you go back to because you actually want to know. And so I think it's the developer advocate, the product that they're advocating for, and then the information and documentation around that product.

I think you all just described that trifecta of empowerment for a developer.

So curious as far as moving on toward future thoughts and solutions perhaps, and maybe the solution for re-engaging a community is simply giving them time, space and the opportunity to engage, but not necessarily saying you must engage, but I am curious if there are any experiments that any of you have run during a dip in community where you're like, wow, we did not realise that people were super excited to come back around that theme. So if there's any experiments you might've run that you actually saw were quite successful during a normally slow time or any ideas that those experiments successful or failed have led into other things that people might be able to use for re-engagement.

Jules Damji: I think it's a whole question about how do we actually persuade people without forcing them to do thing? And I think this is appealing to the agency. It's very important for them that community members or developers actually have full control of the agency. And so you try to do a couple of things. You try to highlight certain gaps in their particular knowledge to say, Hey, listen, we are doing this particular workshop or we are having this particular, we're posting this particular blog and there's going to be a series of blogs. These are the things that we think people can actually learn from it. Would you think, right, would you be interested in that? So I think giving them the agency and identifying the gap, because once you tell them what do you actually think about product A?

Is that satisfies your knowledge? Is there a gap between how you used to do things and what you can actually do with this new thing that clicks in the interest and gives them the agents to say, I'm going to engage.

The second thing is I think posing questions like this, I'm doing this, what do you think? Will this actually help you? That again, appeals to the agency agency. I think doing these kinds of experiments and changing the form and format, I think Liz alluded earlier, which is about doing a constant poll or doing a q and a or doing office hours for example, or doing hands-on coding sessions, all these different forms of experiments. I think at least in my case, that kind of helped a little bit. There hasn't been that inflexion point. We begin to see more and more people are willing to actually come in and do that. And the second thing, how do you actually now do the hybrid thing?

Because this requires a little bit of logistics. So you want to have an event, let's say in San Francisco and you want to do it a happy hour. Is it feasible to do a happy hour with a hybrid what people are going to drinking virtually? I think that's another bit. So I think these are different changes in these experiments that I'm sort of playing around with and have ideas what I'm going to implement for the Q1 H one and see how it goes.

Brian King: Some things that have worked for me in the past are in-person meetings for your community. I know that's tricky at this time and it's also depends on the nature of your community and the size of your community. If it's a large community, you can't invite thousands of people to get together, but maybe for example, you have an ambassador programme, maybe it's a good time to get all the ambassadors together that's a smaller group and say, Hey, let's plan. Let's plan for the next year. Let's see what we can do. Never underestimate the strength of a new edition. So during a downtime, get your design team on it and say, Hey, let's get this out to our most active contributors. And you'll see the photos up on social media and so on.

It's always a good time to reward and recognise and call out your community, but when you have more time to do it, perhaps that's a very good time.

Liz Moy: So in my last role, and honestly I think I see this a lot more in the air tables and Zapier and these sort of really great new low-code tools that exist where it's really allowing people to build these experiences essentially with little to no code. I was realising that there were a lot of those that I saw people using in conjunction with our product. And I also had heard just these random stories kind of either I heard the story of an artist who basically hired a whole team to build an entire project that used some of our APIs, which was a really cool project. And they, they're just little stories of people that wouldn't have what I would say is a traditionally tech background, but did want to use our APIs to build something. So when we kind of had a little bit of a lull, I proposed that we tried doing hackathon for artists and kind of give them some enablement tools of how they could get started building some sort of something they wanted to create.

It actually was so great. We partnered with an organisation called Kme that's based in the Bay Area. So a lot of artists from their community participated and then some artists that just we kind of knew or people knew through our networks and the projects that came out of it were really interesting, and it was just so dramatically different from a lot of the other things we would see people using the product to build. So I was very happy and excited about that possibility because I think it opened up my eyes to the fact that there were a lot of other communities that I typically wouldn't think of serving, but that were still there and excited to play and to build

Rebecca Marshburn: Perhaps an underlying theme that each of you're touching on that I had no words to articulate until the three of you just answered. So thank you is almost this idea of, I mean, we're always serving our communities and building for them, even if we're not present externally or they're not present at the time, what we're still doing then is when we are perhaps quieter or more internal, we are building the things that will serve them externally when they're ready. And so I think both of you touched on that. Can you find new partnerships that make sense? Are there other communities you should be engaging with that you as a developer advocate or developer manager or it's a community success manager, can start to build those relationships within the downtime because you also actually have time to dig in and like Brian, I think you said, get those designs ready.

And that's one example of there are so many things where we end up using the same swag, for example, right? Because we made that design once and we haven't had time to go back and work with our internal design teams or order the things that we needed or change anything really. And so I think that those quiet moments are so important for us to then go build those relationships either with our internal stakeholder teams or with ourselves to fin what we need in terms of how to set ourselves up for success for serving the community or building those other partnerships or finding those new ways to give ourselves the time to connect with community members when they're back and when they're ready to engage. With that said, I want to thank you for that. It's not always about how do we make sure people are engaging, but how do we prepare to allow them to engage best. So maybe the internal or some of those quiet lulls are actually just really great for hibernation mode of self-reflection and then building to build forward. So thank you for those insights. And Matthew, I believe that you have a little outro for us and some questions for how we can connect with everyone here on the show.

Matthew Revell:* Yeah, well, one thing that's come up for me in this episode has been a call back to DevRel Book Club where we covered a book called Laziness Does Not Exist. And one of the central themes of that book was that we as human beings need to make downtime. We're allowed to have downtime. If we don't have it, then bad things happen. And I think it's the same for communities. Yeah. So it's really, really great to have that kind of echoed here.

Jules Damji: I guess the downtime can manifest itself in asking less or giving the community time to breathe as much as you need the time to breathe as well.

Matthew Revell:* Yeah,

Jules Damji: So asking less.

Matthew Revell:* Yeah.

Jules Damji: And I was wondering, not to be tongue in cheek here, but Matthew and Rebecca, did you consider asking this question to chat GBT and see what kind of answers you get?

Matthew Revell:* Every time I go on, it's too busy, so I'm stuck in the Stone Age, I'm

Jules Damji: Afraid then you wouldn't need us. I need you. You

Brian King: Could just do a screen share on it. That's it.

Jules Damji: That's right. We can just do it live and see what kind of questions they actually answer. But yeah, that would be fun. I'll try to post some questions. If I get some insightful answers that doesn't match any of us three provided you, then I'll forward those to you or you

Rebecca Marshburn: That in mind. Where can people find you, Jules? Where should they connect with you publicly?

Jules Damji: Oh, of course. Yeah. I mean, I think when Matthew introduced me, I didn't say what I do. I work for a company called Any Scale World, the Original Creators Array. And those people actually want to wonder what raise all about. We are entering what I would call the ze skies to AI and machine learning. And Ray is one of the products that actually, one of the open source products that came out from Rice Lab in uc, Berkeley, which was a successor of AMPLab where Spark was born and Meso was born to Rice Ray is this distributed system that allows to scale your AI and workload. So we are very excited to be part of that.

In fact, chat g, PT and GT three were trained using Grey. So we're definitely in that particular distributed computing horsepower that we actually provide. So yeah, you can connect me on Twitter, follow me, I'll follow you. I know it sounds dodgy, but we follow each other everywhere in this world on LinkedIn. More than happy to ask you any questions about Ray or anything want to talk about generally. I'm here 24 7.

Rebecca Marshburn: Well give yourself a little downtime, Joel. So maybe three six.

Jules Damji: Well, I a chat more than answer the question. Just kidding.

Matthew Revell:* Liz, how about you?

Liz Moy: Yeah, I actually think I'm going to change my job title to API stylist because I love that so much. So you find me on LinkedIn as API stylist. But yeah, thanks again so much for having me. This was really great and I feel like I learned a lot from everybody in the episodes. So I am doing developer advocacy over at Volt. We have a data encryption platform that will let you encrypt any incoming and wrap on data and also process that data as well. So we're just getting things started over there, but it's a really exciting time. So if you have any questions about encryption or anything security related, if I don't know the answer myself, I can find somebody who knows the answer.

So you can find me on Twitter at ecm OY, and at LinkedIn under limo.

Matthew Revell:* Great, thanks. And Brian, we've watched in real time as the Sunset has come to your home through the window. Where can people find you online?

Brian King: You can find me or online. Sorry. I was going to say, you can find me running around the fields outside during, by downtime in rural Ireland. You can find me at Brian King on Twitter. And if you want to find out more about the Couchbase community, go to couchbase.com/community. The best place to, if you're interested in a modern, fast and flexible database platform, trying it out for your applications, I urge you to join our discourse where you can have real time conversations with our teams. I'll be there.

Matthew Revell:* Wonderful. Well, thank you everyone. Sorry,

Brian King: Did I say, I think I said discourse, I meant discord. I'm always mixing up those two discord. Yes, our Discord server, excuse me.

Matthew Revell:* When I worked Couchbase, we did have a discourse, so I just thought it was,

Brian King: Oh, we still do

Matthew Revell:* That. Still. Cool. Well, look, thank you everyone so much. This has been a great discussion. I really appreciate you joining me and Rebecca, but also to everyone who's watched and will be watching the video subsequently. So I guess see you around on the internet.

Jules Damji: Thank Delighted.