DEV Community: James Bohrman

Slack pop go brrrrr: Leveraging asynchronous communication for happier developer communities

James Bohrman — Fri, 19 Mar 2021 10:22:28 +0000

Introduction

Have you ever gotten a Slack message and felt a sense of dread even though it wasn’t even work-related? For me, it’s almost as if the familiar pop of a Slack message has begun to activate a primal fear instinct if it’s at a certain time of night.

This is why I believe that when taking on any Developer Relations project, it is important to assess the communication strategy for that particular community. In this blog post, I’m going to introduce you to the two forms of communication and the pros and cons of each.

Synchronous Communication

Understanding synchronous communication is pretty simple in that it is an exchange in communication that is “in sync”. Some key examples of platforms for synchronous communication would be Discord, Slack, Zoom, and others.

Synchronous communication has its place in the mix and it’s necessary for things like a daily standup, team meetings, or anything that needs to be discussed in real-time. The issue is that it is impossible to address issues the second they are presented, which only creates a distraction for the receiver. Some key disadvantages to fully real-time communication include:

Increased Stress: The pressure to respond immediately can often result in unnecessary stress for the individual
Slack Fatigue: Individuals that are active in many different communities may experience a sense of fatigue and burnout
FOMO: A constant stream of instant notifications can induce a “fear of missing out” which can become distracting to both productivity and work/life balance.
Unsuitable responses: Often, the pressure to respond first, and think later results in making potential unwise decisions. Instead of taking time to analyze what has been done so far and what remains, you work with half-cooked information that compromises your judgment.

Asynchronous Communication

In contrast, asynchronous communication is a form of communication where there is no expectation of an immediate response. In theory, Slack can be used asynchronously, but the reality often does not play out that way.

This form of communication offers a great deal of freedom to individuals and provides more control over their time, more autonomy, and fewer distractions so they focus on doing great work. It’s perfect for a remote, distributed community that is scattered across time zones. Some of the key benefits of asynchronous communication include:

Better focus, less distraction: Real-time communication requires individuals to pause what they are working on to address the current issues. With asynchronous communication, the individual has control over their time and focus.
Timezone-agnostic collaboration: By leveraging asynchronous comms, individuals can update each other and share progress on their own time.
Happier and healthier community: Asynchronous communication allows community members to respond in their own time—in contrast, real-time comms induce a FOMO feeling as conversations proceed when individuals are offline.

I believe that asynchronous communication is the way to go in this age of distributed communication. It allows community members to take back the time that is already filled heavily with an "always-on” culture of Slack notifications while increasing productivity.

Conclusion

Slack fatigue and our perpetually connected culture can be a major contributor to stress and eventually burnout if it goes too far. There is no reason that your community should feel the weight of constant real-time communication if it’s not absolutely necessary, so adopting a mixed approach that leans heavily into the asynchronous communication is my personal go to.

Originally published at Cloudspeakers on March 19, 2021.

Are NFTs a perfect tool for community building?

James Bohrman — Sat, 06 Mar 2021 08:52:23 +0000

Key Takeaways:

Many members have the desire for games and activity
Non-fungible assets have the potential to “gamify” users community experience
Creating scarcity in a community breeds engagementent
Solutions can go beyond collecting and into custom games tailored to community needs

Introduction

It’s been a big week for NFTs this week with stories of artists and influencers selling digital assets for millions of dollars that most people would be able to simply download with a few clicks of a mouse. This might sound like a crazy way for the super-rich to flex their wealth, but NFTs happen to have a very interesting use case in community building.

The concept of non-fungible assets may be new to some people so let’s get a little crash course. To begin, let’s consider the difference between fungible and non-fungible. Bitcoin is a fungible asset, which means you can one for another bitcoin, and you’ll have exactly the same thing. On the other hand, that super rare Pokemon card you’ve been saving for years is a non-fungible asset. If you traded it for a different card, you’d have something completely different.

Hold on a second... What are NFTs?

NFTs are like a digital “certificate of ownership” that are meant to authenticate a claim to an asset, and allow it to be transferred or sold. These certificates are supported by blockchain technology similar to what supports Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

The key difference between NFTs and cryptocurrencies is that currencies allow fungible trade, which means anyone can create Bitcoins that can be exchanged for other Bitcoins. NFTs are by definition non-fungible, and are deployed as individual chains of ownership to track a specific asset. NFTs are designed to uniquely restrict and represent a unique claim on an asset. - Luke Heemsbergen

NFTs enable the creation of technical scarcity on the internet by allowing new types of goods.

How does this relate to community building?

One of the most important things about running any community is finding new ways to keep members engaged. It may not seem like it on the surface, but creating scarcity in a community breeds engagement. Members of a community often thrive when offered games and activities that allow rewards for engagement. This is where NFTs have the potential to “gamify” users’ community experience.

For example, take the popular NFT based game “Cryptokitties” where users can trade and sell virtual kittens. This game is WILDLY popular with some users paying thousands of dollars for these digital cats. This is a prime example of how scarcity can breed engagement in a community.

So let’s imagine that you’re looking for a way to gamify your users’ experience, and are exploring involving NFTs in some way. You have a few options if that’s the case:

Collectibles
- You can create a range of NFT collectibles for your community to exchange among themselves. The issue with this is that simple collecting can become repetitive.
Collectibles + Gamification
- You can create a range of collectibles, but also add gaming elements into the process. A trading card game is one good example, where members exchange the cards and then battle them.
Badges
- You can create NFT badges for special events that are able to be sold and exchanged as digital assets.

Whatever you do, it is important that you keep the assets you make true to your brand. For example, if I was building NFT assets for Orbit, I would probably keep an astronaut/space theme for whatever assets I create.

Conclusion

There is definitely a lot of promise in using NFTs to gamify community engagement, and I hope to get to put the idea to work one day. I’d love to hear what your thoughts are on this topic, so feel free to leave some feedback!

Originally published at James Bohrman | Developer Avocado 🥑 on March 06, 2021.

A (very) small list of cool DevRel people and groups you should know about

James Bohrman — Wed, 03 Mar 2021 22:56:17 +0000

Introduction

The field of Developer Advocacy is growing at a tremendous rate and with that growth comes a wealth of new thought leaders and communities. In this blog post, I'm going to introduce you to the 7 DevRel communities and leaders that have made the biggest impact on my journey.

1. Community Club

Community Club is a quickly growing community of community builders that provides a huge range of resources to new and seasoned community managers alike. At Community Club you can expect to find:

A large content library with blogs, talks, and podcasts
Regular AMA Sessions
Weekly newsletters
Updated list of tools and software
Job Board

Community Club also provides a comprehensive career change program for aspiring community managers called C School.

2. DevRel Collective

Next up comes DevRel Collective. This is a great community for any aspiring Developer Advocate and to my knowledge was one of the first established communities for DevRel. DevRel collective is an exclusive community of DevRel practitioners that exists to facilitate sharing information, resources, and encouragement among the Developer Relations community.

3. Mary Thengvall

Mary Thengvall is Director of Developer Relations at Camunda as well as the writer of "The Business Value of Developer Relations: How and Why Technical Communities Are Key To Your Success". I first learned about Mary's work through reading her blog post comparing Developer Advocates to Avocado's and have always enjoyed staying up to date with her work.

4. Aaron Aldrich

Aaron Aldritch is a Developer Advocate at Launch Darkly that advocates for conversations regarding mental health in tech. I was able to see Aaron speak in person at DevOps Days 2019 and the content on mental health spoke very deeply to me and my personal struggles. Ever since then I've always stayed up to date with Aaron's content.

5. Orbit Community Discord

Orbit not only offers a really interesting platform for measuring the health of your community but also a vibrant and active DevRel community hosted on Discord. In this community, you are free to talk about the Orbit Model/Platform and how it correlates to your community goals, or you can just hang out and talk about anything on your mind.

Conclusion

Know a community you think I should know about? Shoot me a Tweet and let me know! This is a rapidly growing ecosystem and although I'd love to keep up with everything all the time, sometimes that's not easy 😅.

My favorite tools and integrations to leverage as a Developer Avocado 🥑

James Bohrman — Wed, 03 Mar 2021 22:54:11 +0000

Introduction

From an outsider's perspective, Developer Advocacy can often seem like nothing but an endless stream of tweeting, live streams, and convention circuits. However, building developer communities involves a lot more than just being an influencer. Advocacy requires building a foundation for developers to bring their voices together and share them with your organization. As Mary Thengvall says:

Avocados take a long time to ripen, and it’s an even longer process if you take into account that it takes 5 years for an avocado tree to be fruitful.

Just like the avocado's journey from seed to tree, a sustainable Developer Advocacy program takes time to develop. In this blog post, I am going to share some of my favorite tools for building a vibrant developer community. Some of these tools may be familiar to you, and some may not be.

1. Stackbit

Stackbit is an open and complete platform that allows users to create fully-featured Jamstack sites in seconds. The platform is an open ecosystem and allows users to bring their own framework and Headless CMS or choose from the best available tools. I used it for this blog and it has cut the time it takes for me to create sites exponentially.

Pricing: $29/mo

2. Circle

Circle is a community management platform that allows you to establish a central presence where your community can come to collaborate, share resources, attend events, and receive updates. Some of the notable features Circle provides are:

Set up membership communities
Live streams
Q&A Support
1:1 Chats

The platform is growing in popularity and being used by many awesome communities such as Community Club and Teal. If you navigate to their pages, you can get a feel for what a typical Circle setup looks like for a community.

Pricing: $39/mo

3. Commsor

Commsor is billed as a "Community Operating System". This means that by integrating with all the tools you already use and tying your community data together, Commsor enables you to unlock insights, measure impact, and build a community-led organization.

This approach is very beneficial for organizations that struggle with selling the benefit of DevRel to their executive team, and need a solution that can be connected to certain OKR's and KPI's.

It's also worth mentioning the Commsor is also the team behind the Community Club that I mentioned in

Cost: Contact for a Demo

4. Run the World

Run The World is an online events platform that caters to over 40,000+ speakers and event hosts by providing a platform where they can monetize their events through ticketed virtual events.

The platform allows its users to sell tickets to both small and large events. A smaller event would cover about 50-100 whereas a larger event would attract a gathering of about 500-3,000 attendees.

Cost: $99/yr

5. Orbit

To understand what Orbit as a platform is, it's important to first understand what Orbit as a _model _ is. The Orbit Model is a framework for building high gravity communities. A high gravity community is one that excels at attracting and retaining members by providing an outstanding member experience.

The Orbit Model contains four fundamental concepts: Gravity, Love, Reach and Orbit Level:

Love is a member's level of engagement and activity in the community.
Reach is a measure of a community member’s sphere of influence.
Gravity is the attractive force of a community that acts to retain existing members and attract new ones.
Orbit levels are a practical tool for member segmentation and used to design different programs for each level of the community.

The Orbit Platform is a "community experience" platform for high gravity communities. Personally, I feel like this platform is very similar to Commsor, but the thing that sets it apart is the fact it leverages the Orbit Model to measure the health of your community to prove ROI. The platform itself is still a bit glitchy, but the community is very active and available. This is one of the tools I would not personally use ATM but I'm very excited to see what it becomes.

Pricing: TBD (Beta)

6. Instruqt

Instruct is a scalable and customizable platform for creating interactive learning environments that have the ability to be run right in your browser. This allows you to offload part of the developer education process and intentionally create a self-serve "academy" portal for your community to receive hands-on product education right in their browsers.

Pricing: Contact for a demo

Honorable Mention: LaunchPass

LaunchPass deserves at least a mention because of its novel ability to monetize Slack and Discord communities. For those of us in the DevRel space who prefer the solo track, it's important to have ways to monetize the communities we build and turn them into a stable income.

Pricing: $29/mo

Conclusion

Building a sustainable community is hard, but with the right tools and processes, it doesn't have to be chaotic. Hopefully, this small compilation of my favorite tools is beneficial to you, but if you would like a more complete list of the ecosystem you should give Community Club's Tools & Software List a peek! There is a huge amount of information there about what types of tools are out there. Thanks for reading!

DEV Community: James Bohrman

Slack *pop* go brrrrr: Leveraging asynchronous communication for happier developer communities

Introduction

Synchronous Communication

Asynchronous Communication

Conclusion

Are NFTs a perfect tool for community building?

Introduction

Hold on a second... What are NFTs?

How does this relate to community building?

Conclusion

A (very) small list of cool DevRel people and groups you should know about

Introduction

1. Community Club

2. DevRel Collective

3. Mary Thengvall

4. Aaron Aldrich

5. Orbit Community Discord

Conclusion

My favorite tools and integrations to leverage as a Developer Avocado 🥑

Introduction

1. Stackbit

2. Circle

3. Commsor

4. Run the World

5. Orbit

6. Instruqt

Honorable Mention: LaunchPass

Conclusion

Slack pop go brrrrr: Leveraging asynchronous communication for happier developer communities