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Building Blocks for an Innovative and Inclusive Developer Community: Part 2

Sarah-Jane Morris — Wed, 07 Aug 2019 17:51:16 +0000

NB: This post was originally published on Heavybit's Blog on June 27th, 2019
Cover image by Wynand van Poortvliet on Unsplash

Part 2: Mid-Stage Growth Considerations

In Part 1 of Building Blocks for an Innovative and Inclusive Developer Community, we covered what an early-stage developer-facing startup needs to consider in order to put in place an early framework that supports and fosters a welcome and healthy developer community. In Part 2, we’ll discuss real examples of do’s and don’ts and how to take this framework to the next level as your company grows.

As you scale and/or approach your Series A, your developer product has made it through the make or break early slog. It has gained traction, and you may even have an active developer community. You likely know some of your early adopters well and are starting to see some of the same faces show up at multiple events. Congratulations, you’ve got an active developer community!

Now that you’ve defined some community spaces, both online and off, and folks are leveraging them, you may be tempted to sit back and let the community continue to grow on its own. But fostering a community is a long game – if you neglect it today, you may not feel the consequences tomorrow or even next week, but you’ll feel them next year. So what should you be doing to ensure that your newfound developer community is not only growing but thriving, both today and down the road?

Start With Feedback

Here's who FB originally tested their Oculus VR headsets on. Photo by Lux Interaction on Unsplash

Having an active community gives you a tremendous opportunity to listen and learn from them. Failing to do so can result in product oversights that can derail progress and impact revenue and future runway. Seeking out and addressing feedback and reflecting the realities of your community members can reduce friction and increase developer output.

An example of a missed feedback opportunity was shared by experienced UX researcher and project manager, Nancy Douyon when I attended Tech Inclusion San Francisco in 2016. Her talk was on Inclusive Product Design, where she showcased a glaring example of unconscious bias oversight and a lack of diverse feedback for the Oculus VR headset, which was essentially unwearable by folks with thick hairstyles, turbans or other modalities outside that of the largely white, male product team and beta community testing it. While this is a hardware example, it showcases how easily glaring feedback omissions can impact a product’s user experience.

How Are You Speaking to Your Community?

Chances are, as you approach this next stage of growth, you’re already creating and publishing content regularly for your audience. Perhaps your engineers are contributing blog content and you may even have a Developer Advocate on board creating content, sample code, documentation and more. Your company is adding value to both your own developer community and the developer community at large. However, similar to the product design oversights caused by unconscious bias that we saw in the Oculus example above, unchecked content (explicit example & implicit example) can unknowingly alienate members of your developer community. How can you mitigate this?

AI may have its fair share of inclusion challenges, but when developed and designed to be inclusive, it can be a powerful ally in helping us fight our own unconscious bias. Once such example is Textio, a writing platform that is typically used to optimize the hiring experience but can be used to vet any human-facing content. Based on ever-improving algorithms and data, Textio will output tactical feedback on word selection and propose alternatives to make your content more welcoming and inclusive. Use Textio across all of your widely consumed developer content: job descriptions, blog posts, documentation, even readmes.

Do Potential and Current Members See Themselves Represented in Your Community?

A genderqueer person looking at their phone. Photo byBroadly’s Gender Spectrum Collection.

As much as you need to ensure that your written content is inclusive, the visual cues your content and community activities convey are equally important to get right. However, choosing inclusive imagery may not be as simple as running content through an AI engine. The visual choices you make need to actually be representative of your community.

For example – there are many fantastic image sets featuring folks of color in a tech setting available for your use, but if you use them on a job listing, for example, and don’t actually have any folks of color working at your startup, you’re setting a potential applicant up for disappointment and deception. However, if you’re considering images to go alongside more generic content, such as a feature update, open-source project page, event invite or knowledge-sharing article, the use of these images can send a signal that the representation of all developers is important to your company.

Some of the image collections that are available include the Women of Color in Tech Flickr set, available for use with attribution, and Broadly’s Gender Spectrum Collection (note that these images cannot be used for commercial purposes. In other words, these can be used in the context of open source projects and personal developer blog posts in places like dev.to or medium, but not on company websites. Please be sure to read these guidelines completely in order to use these images mindfully.) All of these resources, as well as new ones that emerge, can be found here.

As your developer community activates and multiplies, be sure to make space for underrepresented members of the tech community. Ensuring that these members feel welcome and represented in your community can accelerate product growth and result in surprising, delightful and game-changing outcomes now and down the road.

In the final post in this series, I’ll examine what areas of community you’ll need to keep on going tabs on as more and more developers rely on your product and build on your platform, and as your company approaches profitability, exponential revenue, and an exit or an IPO!

Building Blocks for an Innovative and Inclusive Developer Community: Part 1

Sarah-Jane Morris — Mon, 24 Jun 2019 17:29:05 +0000

NB: This post was originally published on Heavybit's Blog on June 6th, 2019
Cover image by Belinda Fewings on Unsplash

Part 1: Early Stage Considerations

It's essential for early-stage startups to focus on what matters. While that’s a little different from company to company, most seed-stage or series A startups are focused on building out a product that can scale, and generating the revenue needed to secure more runway. In the case of developer-facing products that solve a real pain point, a community of early adopters and advocates may already be organically forming during this stage. While it may seem sufficient to lean on that organic growth for now and be more strategic about community building later, you may be missing out on opportunities to understand your product better, broaden your scope and lay the groundwork for a community that will impact your products’ innovation more than you could have imagined.

The Developer You’re Building for May Not Be Who You Think

You’re creating the next great developer product. It’s going to help speed up development cycles and delight developers along the way. You think you have a good idea of who the ideal devs are for your product. Are you sure about that?

One of the thrilling parts of building and growing a developer community is seeing all of the surprising ways developers will use your product. Companies like Kit used Shopify’s APIs in ways previously unseen and went on to be acquired by Shopify, becoming an indispensable marketing tool for Shopify’s merchants. If you put the right community frameworks in place early on, you can not only build a loyal set of early adopters, you can leverage your community to push the boundaries of what’s possible with your product.

Challenge Your Own Assumptions

In order to get into the minds of your current and potential community members, you need to step outside yourself and the network you know and trust. Your network will always be there to support and inform your company but to better understand the potential of a community of users, you need to understand how they’re interpreting your value proposition and imagining uses for your products with fresh eyes.

There are a number of ways to go about this, but they all involve one key thing: listening. Depending on the size of your current developer community, you can approach this in a number of ways. Developer user interviews can be insightful, even with all the internal feedback you may be generating while dogfooding your own product. Also, consider a developer survey. Not only will this give you a clear line of sight into the benefits and drawbacks your current users are experiencing, but it also gives you an opportunity to measure a baseline of the dimensions of diversity within your community, allowing you to set realistic goals around diversity and inclusion as you grow.

Diversity wheel showcasing different dimensions of diversity, developed by John's Hopkins University Diversity Leadership Council

Seeking external validation of your ideas in your early stages needn’t be excessively complicated or time-consuming. There are valuable and inclusive developer communities that will happily engage with your idea or MVP and potentially become sources of community growth.

One such community that has exploded in popularity this year is dev.to(👋), founded in 2017 as an offshoot of the popular Twitter account, @ThePracticalDev. Sharing your products and learnings with this inclusive, well moderated, and accessible developer community will pay off in the short-term with feedback you may not have otherwise gotten from your existing network, and in the long-term with the trust of a community that values inclusion. Conversely, communities like Hacker News, while sure to bring your site traffic and maybe even some conversions, has time and time again been shown to be a toxic community. Mekka Okereke, an engineer at Google, recently summed it up well in this twitter thread.

A Must for Community Health

If there’s one community investment to make in the early stages of your community’s growth, it’s a code of conduct. Even if you don’t yet have an online user community or forum, if you’re at all open source, or if you’re hosting events – anything from a casual happy hour to a conference, a code of conduct is a way to ensure developers of all walks of life feel protected and welcome in your community. Although it’s no longer being actively maintained, the Geek Feminism Wiki remains a solid, evergreen resource for Code of Conduct creation (as well as all other things inclusion-related). Just as important as Code of Conduct creation is Code of Conduct enforcement. Getting your team trained on how to respond to Code of Conduct violations is the only way to ensure that having a CoC will provide meaningful value to your community. Valerie Aurora and Mary Gardiner have written a fantastic (and free) code of conduct enforcement book that can be downloaded here.

Who is the Founding Team?

Community begets community. Without a concerted effort, a community, like a company, will naturally attract members that look, think, and act like existing members. It’s no secret that many founders in tech are white, male, and young. If your founding team meets this description, there are still plenty of opportunities to pave the way for a diverse and welcoming community. However, because your organic community will not benefit from the representation of more marginalized groups in tech at the founder level, your community will need to ensure that your desire to build an inclusive, welcoming community is crystal clear to the folks considering joining it. A shining example of this is Slack, founded by Stewart Butterfield and Cal Henderson. From a 2018 Atlantic article on Slack’s diversity:

These efforts began with the company’s launch in 2014, and have only accelerated. “All of us believe it’s our responsibility,” Julia Grace, Slack’s senior director of infrastructure engineering, told me.

Slack’s intentional approach to diversity and inclusion resulted in not only a more diverse workplace but a more welcoming developer experience, down to the smallest detail. For example, Slack’s docs don’t assume a developer knows what oAuth is, defining it clearly before getting into details around flow and access. Simple details like this may be overlooked by a community of experienced developers, closing off access to a newer developer that may write the next great integration.

Early days are focused on growth and scale, but taking these small steps to invest in the potential of your developer community ensures you’re setting the stage for inclusion and innovation that can take your product to the next level.

In the next post in this series, we’ll be looking at the essential areas of community building for mid-stage developer startups.

How to Encourage Developer Community Collaboration from Day One

Sarah-Jane Morris — Thu, 30 May 2019 17:08:56 +0000

NB: This post was originally published on Vanilla Forums' Blog on May 28th, 2019
Cover image by Bharathi Kannan on Unsplash

In this fourth and final post in our series about encouraging developer community collaboration, we’ll take a look at how some established and newer developer communities including Slack, Shopify, Atlassian, and Stoplight fostered collaboration from the earliest stages of their developer community (when their community members were but wee pups!).

Talk, Talk, Talk!

All of our developer community experts agreed that when getting started building community on your platform, spending time talking to all engaged developers is crucial. This intentional outreach sets the stage for building trust, a crucial factor in ensuring your developers will want to grow with your platform and help other developers grow within it.

Keep your early-stage developers directly aware of any changes to the program. Early adoption by a developer can often also mean trust in the founding team, so keeping these developers informed of changes, no matter how tiny or sweeping they may be in the early days, can keep your developers along for the ride as you iterate and grow.

As you speak to these developers, ideas for collaboration will likely pop up. Directly introducing early stage developers to each other at this stage encourages collaboration a little more manually from the start. Neil Mansilla, Head of Developer Experience at Atlassian, told me many of the early stage devs from the Atlassian community remain active leaders in their communities as a result of this strong early stage relationship.

Ask, Ask, Ask!

Talking to developers is crucial, but you can really take it to the next level by asking them targeted and specific questions. This can result in getting the direction that you need to build out your product and create a set of tools or APIs that developers will want to collaborate on.

Asking questions, be it through one on one conversation or through surveys, will help fill that early stage community trust battery. This will ultimately ensure that your developers not only feel safe to build and create in your community but will also feel better about their fellow developers within the community, which will increase the chances of collaboration.

When Taylor Barnett, Lead Community Engineer at Stoplight, was making early-stage technology decisions for Stoplight's community, she talked to as many developers as she could:

“When I joined Stoplight, as employee number nine, there wasn't any place for users to talk to each other at all. I had to call over 30 different users in the first few months, and I was like, what would you like to see? It became apparent that people wanted to see how other people are using Stoplight. They wanted to collaborate on different things around Stoplight. The forum made sense.” - Taylor Barnett, Stoplight

In order to grow a safe and inclusive community with staying power, it’s important to intentionally showcase diverse developers to your wider community. Doing so will help developers of all kinds feel represented and welcome, resulting in richer collaborations and more powerful integrations in the long run.

“Diversity and inclusion are super important for us. I'll look for some of the amazing vocal people and poke my team like, 'this person is a great writer, we haven't showcased them or people like him or her, so let's give them more of a voice!’” - Liz Couto, Shopify

Nurture the Natural Helpers

“There's a guy named Daniel Wester and he was with a company called Appfire and he has some very successful apps on the marketplace but he's also just one of those guys that just loves to help people out. He's not doing it for karma points, he's not doing it for anything other than the fact that he's very passionate about helping other people. We're lucky that we have quite a few people that are like that. These devs have been with us for ten to twelve years and sometimes know the product better than we do!“ - Neil Mansilla, Atlassian

If you're lucky, some folks that are just naturally helpful will be early and enthusiastic members of your community. If you want to increase the odds of that happening, make sure that you create and widely share a solid code of conduct with enforcement planning from the get-go. This will ensure that the kinds of developers that emerge in the early stages of your community know that in order to share their knowledge, they must do so respectfully. Elizabeth Kinsey, Developer Marketing Manager at Slack, lists code of conduct creation as her top tip to ensure the building blocks for collaboration are in place for a new developer community:

“Know what the boundaries and the guidelines are, that you want for people in that community. Create a safe space by creating the expectation that people will treat each other kindly. And you can't do it just with hope. That is a place where you do have to really hard line and say this is what we expect out of our people who are participating in this. And this is the kind of behavior that will not be tolerated. So I think that that is a critical piece.” - Elizabeth Kinsey, Slack

Taken from my former Keen IO colleague Justin Johnson’s presentation, “Building Community at a Company That Makes Things for Makers”
One of my favorite tactics for building developer commitment, trust, and collaboration was the care packs we’d sent out to developers during Keen IO’s first couple of years building out their community. Keen’s API had an easter egg, that when discovered by a developer, allowed them to enter a t-shirt size, color preference, and shipping address. Every week, the community team would get together and assemble the care packages with t-shirts, stickers and silly toys, and then personalize each box before shipping them off. When received, developers would tweet pics of them, building a ton of goodwill within Keen’s early stage developer community. This helped Keen ensure that their early stage devs stuck around.

Check out my online workshop on Vanilla's site that walks through all the juiciest takeaways from the developer collaboration series!

A Step-by-Step Guide to Hosting Inclusive Developer Meetups or Events In Your Office

Sarah-Jane Morris — Wed, 29 May 2019 17:15:47 +0000

Cover image by #WOCinTech Chat

Why Host Events?

Events are a fantastic way to grow, activate and retain your community members and are engaging for employees as well. When I worked on the developer community team at Keen IO from 2015-2017, I helped host a ton of events. By the end of my time there, I think I'd personally helped to host at least 30 events in our office. Many more took place without my support, in part because of this handy guide and checklist I put together for our internal team. I've had it up on GitHub where it was gathering digital dust, so I figured I'd give it a little refresh and share it here on dev.to where it can be widely used!

Hosting events can be time-consuming and resource intensive. From finding speakers, coordinating logistics like food and seating, and being empathetic to attendee wants and needs, there's a lot to consider.

The following is a guide to empower you to take the reigns and organize your own events in your office’s events space, grow and diversify your community, create a safe space, and thrill attendees! It will be especially helpful to startups without a dedicated events team. Assumptions are being made that you have proper A/V equipment (a projector, screen, mic(s) and speakers), a place to store food, and supplies like folding chairs, tables, dedicated guest Wifi, and gender-neutral restrooms.

Note: This guide will contain some specifics to the Bay Area in 2016, and to our specific office set up at the time, but I refreshed some of the links along the way, and there’s plenty of valuable knowledge and resources in here to make event planning easier and more successful for just about anyone!

An Event Opportunity Knocks!

An event opportunity is on your radar. You think hosting this event would be awesome. Cool! Why? Does your event align with your company’s mission and values? Is this something you’d want to attend? Will your attendees have a great time and be glad they came?

If you think this event will be beneficial for your community and the events’ attendees themselves, your next step is to choose a date. If applicable, check your company events calendar to see what’s coming up.

Now that you have a date, let’s start going through planning!

Tasklist: 3-4 Weeks (or more) Before Event

✔ Pick your event date
✔ Unsure what time your event should be held? Check out this great article on an alternative to the usual evening tech meetup:

Making technology MeetUps more accessible

Jim Bennett ☁️ ・ May 24 '19 ・ 8 min read

#meetup #community #inclusion

✔ Book the time on your company’s event calendar
✔ If the event is open to employees, be sure to send a calendar invite to everyone in advance so everyone can be aware of and plan for the event.
✔ Capacity: Be sure you know your event space capacity in advance, to help know what to cap our registration numbers at. Between 30% and half of your registrants will actually show up for a free event. Asking folks to pay a small fee is one way to ensure you have a better understanding on your total number of registrants, but since most tech meetups are free, this can be a slippery slope and may exclude some otherwise awesome attendees.
✔ Now’s a great time to secure resources: Typically, a successful event requires a team of 5-6 (Emcee/host, “Stage Manager” to act as a speaker/sponsor resource and ensure everything is running smoothly, two folks to greet and welcome guests and keep the space clean and drink tub full, and one to two people to register guests at the front and stay at the door). Send any volunteers a calendar request so they don’t forget their duties!
✔ If you find yourself having trouble securing the team of 5-6 needed from your internal team, consider allocating some budget to hiring Taskrabbits to help with event tasks.
✔ Consider having your event recorded and edited? Hiring a videographer can get expensive, this article from Vimeo is full of ideas on getting a videographer or film crew together on a budget.

Speakers

✔ Will your event feature any speaker(s)? Do you know who they are?
✔ If you have one speaker confirmed, but would like some more, please be mindful of featuring underrepresented speakers whenever possible. White women (who, as an aside, are underrepresented in programming communities and less so in marketing communities - something to keep in mind depending on the topic of your event), women of color, men of color and non-binary folk should comprise at least 33% of your speaker roster or panel (if 3 or more people), ideally 50%.
✔ If you have a speaker from your company, it’s always nice to add non-company speaker(s) to open the event up to a wider audience, grow your community and add to attendee value for your event.
✔ A great and growing resource for underrepresented speakers looking to speak!

Event Page Creation

✔ Once you’ve confirmed your speakers, I recommend using Eventbrite or Tito to manage RSVPs. Both are free - Tito has some great analytics and tools, and Eventbrite gives your event an audience boost when published publicly. Choose the one that works best for you!
✔ Your event page should contain the following information in something close to this order (check out our past event pages for inspiration):

Compelling event photo: Great sources for stock images are WOCinTech Chat (please provide attribution: “Photo by #WOCinTech Chat”) or Unsplash.com. PS: Here are some great overall inclusion resources that may prove helpful in your event planning and overall developer community management.
Brief description and pitch: what overall topic is this event about? What is it about this topic that’s interesting to attendees? Why would they want to attend? What questions will be answered?
Speaker list: Name, photo and short 3-4 sentence bio for each speaker
Agenda: This is where you can include useful information about food and drink (or lack thereof). Sample agenda:
- 6:00pm - 6:30pm: Drinks, nibbles and hobnobbing
- 6:30pm - 7:30pm: Talks from our speakers
- 7:30pm - 8:00pm: Panel
- 8:00pm - 8:30pm: More drinks, nibbling, and hobnobbery

✔ Be sure to include a link to a Code of Conduct (Keen’s can be found here) with some contextual information. An example taken from our Focus on Allies talk in September 2016:

“Focus on Allies: Diversity and Inclusion for 2016 is an event for people from many different backgrounds. As such, all attendees,
speakers, sponsors, and volunteers at this event are required to agree
with the Keen IO code of conduct.”

✔ Be sure to clarify whether or not your event space is truly accessible: wheelchair-friendly entrances and ramps are essential, but so are restrooms on the main floor, elevators if there are multiple floors, plenty of space to navigate a wheelchair or mobility aids around the room and between tables and chairs, reserved aisle seating for those with mobility aids, chairs that can accommodate larger sized bodies comfortably, and good lighting, among other considerations.
✔ Make it clear that bathrooms will be gender-neutral. (Perry Eising wrote this amazing post that goes into more detail about gender inclusive tech events here. Read it!)
✔ Consider hiring ASL interpreters to make the event open to the hearing-impaired community. I have used Linguabee, and they are fantastic!
✔ Consider adding the following suggestion to your event copy:

“In the spirit of fostering diversity and inclusion in tech, consider bringing a friend with that doesn’t look like you. Men, bring a friend that’s a woman. White folks, bring a POC friend. Straight folks, bring a friend from the LGBTQ community. Able-bodied folks, bring a disabled friend.”

Eventbrite-specific tips (that will save you time and confusion):

✔ Ensure your tickets are capped out at one ticket per name, otherwise you run the risk of one person buying 20 tickets and showing up with 3 people.
✔ Ensure your ticket sale start and end dates correspond to your selling period and lead up to the day of your event.. Often, Eventbrite will default to weird dates here so it’s important to check this.

Tasklist: 2-3 Weeks Before Event

Promotion

Go forth and promote! Here's your promotional checklist:

✔ If your company has an events calendar, be sure your event has been included.
✔ Tweet about the event. Try to get tweets coming out of your company twitter account if possible for greater reach! If appropriate, consider a hashtag for the event.
✔ Be sure to include speaker twitter handles, and any twitter handles for companies they work for in your promotional tweets. It's a great way to ensure retweets!
✔ Want to schedule some tweets? Add some cool graphics? Try getting a few tweets scheduled through Buffer, and use their cool social image feature, Pablo. Tweets with images have been proven to be more engaging (more retweets, likes, etc.)
✔ Search for and reach out to local, thematically-relevant meetup group organizers for co-promotion. Lots of meetup groups are happy to share relevant events with their communities.
✔ Reach out and invite underrepresented groups in tech. Not only are they eager to hear about new events, expanding your community to a broader set of folks will enrich it!
✔ Ask your Marketing and Community teams if a limited email blast or inclusion in an upcoming newsletter might be relevant and timely for the existing customer and event community.
✔ I've typically seen the majority of registrations happen within the last two weeks leading up to an event, so your best bet is to plan to push for registrations in the two weeks leading up to the event. Folks that register closer to the event are also more likely to show up, especially for free events!

Tasklist: One Week Before Event

✔ Reach out to your speaker(s) with an email asking the following questions:

Do they have what they need?
Can you get a sneak peek at their material? (nothing like a surprise offensive slide!)
What kind of expectations do they have for tech specs: do they want to present off their own computers? If so, be sure to ask them to arrive early to have their presentation setup and A/V checked on your equipment, and have them send you a backup of their presentation (ideally via PDF or Google drive for formatting consistency. Keynote and PowerPoint files sent over email are recipes for disaster)
Ask if they have their own “clicker” (official technical term) to navigate through slides or will need one (be sure to have one in office, at Keen we used this one that has worked on every machine we’ve connected it to)

✔ Encourage speakers to send their slides via Google Drive or Dropbox by noon of the event day or the evening before, and run all presentations off one machine. This prevents awkward pauses and potential technical glitches when switching computers between speakers.
✔ Know the specifics for your projector. At Keen, our projector connected easily with Macbooks with thunderbolt ports or HDMI. Speakers may need to provide dongles for any other configuration.
✔ Book some time with your designated emcee to make sure they are feeling comfortable about the flow of the event, the agenda, and the content they are presenting, which can be:

If relevant, a territorial acknowledgment is a way to pay respect and homage to the indigenous territories where the event is being hosted. (Thanks Alain Wong for this suggestion!)
- Short speaker bios
- Housekeeping info about code of conduct,bathroom location and food/drink location (if not obvious) are usually musts)

✔ If applicable, plan to briefly introduce your company and product to the audience before the speakers begin.
✔ How are your registration numbers looking?

Always assume that for any free event (and 99% of events held in your space should be free, assuming you are looking to build community, not make money off of events), you will have anywhere between a 30-50% attendance rate.
Registration goals should, therefore, account for this. If you’d like to see 50 attendees, plan to promote until you’ve hit 100-150 registrants.

✔ Ensure you have plenty of nametags and sharpies for attendees to write out their names! Order some if needed. Nametags may be cliché but legitimately great networking/icebreaking tools!
✔ Provide pronoun stickers or buttons. Everything you could possibly want to know about pronoun stickers and buttons in this fantastic article:

An Organizer's Guide to Pronoun Buttons

Fen Slattery ・ Oct 25 '18 ・ 9 min read

#community #conference #inclusion #diversity

✔ Make sure you have the desired amount of swag available to distribute at the event. I won't get into what that swag should be, but let's avoid things like this and lean towards things like this.

Tasklist: 3-4 Days Before Event

Catering the Event

✔ You should have an idea by 3-4 days prior to the event of where your registration numbers are headed, so start to consider catering options. Please note, in some cases, the vendors recommended are specific to San Francisco.
✔ No matter your budget, diverse dietary needs can and should be accommodated: vegan, vegetarian, dairy-free and gluten-free.
✔ If you have the budget, consider fine, tasty and nutritious catering from Bi-Rite, which gets excellent attendee feedback and leaves people full, healthy and happy. Apprx $1500 to feed 100 people.
✔ A great mid-tier budget option is La Mediteranée to feed 100 people for $900.
✔ If you have less of a budget, you still have options. Try EZCater (available in most large US cities) for tacos or many other options. 🌮 Pizza is fine every now and again, just be sure to order several varieties and include a gluten-free pie for every 50 or so guests. 🍕 You should also include salad options with pizza. 🥗
✔ Plan for ~.75 alcoholic 🍻 and ~1 non-alcoholic beverage 🥤 per attendee (since not everyone drinks and many people will want a mix of both). You will usually need to over-order in order to ensure variety because most beers are sold in 6 packs or dozens.
✔ Plan to offer a large selection of non-alcoholic beverages* (water, juices, LaCroix, diet and regular sodas, and if you can, mocktails) as well as wine and beer (hard alcohol at public events can be a slippery slope and is generally not recommended in most circumstances 🤢).
✔ If you don't have access to reusable plates/utensils in sufficient amounts, Food vendor orders should also include biodegradable plates/utensils wherever possible, make sure you specify when ordering.
✔ Don’t forget to pick up or order ice! ❄️

Tasklist: 2 Days Before Event

✔ You should have a good idea of attendee numbers at this point, so now’s the time to order your food. Order enough food to cover 50% of your registration numbers (100 RSVPs = food for 50 people).
✔ Ensure you have colleagues and volunteers prepared to work the door for the night, and have clear instructions on how to escalate any incidents. Ensure all people working the door have the organizer’s cell phone number.
✔ Prepare placeholder slide with wifi information
✔ Prepare introductory slides with your company logo and event name (if applicable)

Tasklist: Day Before Event

✔ Send out a reminder about the event and its relevant information (location, directions, accessibility, food, etc) to all attendees. You can do this directly through Eventbrite or Tito.

Tasklist: Day Of Event

AM:

✔ Order beverages and ice on Instacart (if you’re in SF or other Instacart markets), or go buy your groceries, the old fashioned way.

PM:

Housekeeping!
✔ Empty current garbage/compost/recycling
✔ Place bags in containers
✔ Tidy events area and ensure anyone working nearby relocates
✔ Receive groceries, place supplies near food table area
✔ Print event sign for the door
✔ If needed, bring down two barstools/seats for check-in volunteers to sit on
✔ Setup and test projector/slides
✔ Ensure “clicker” is ready to go on the computer being used. The speaker may provide their own “clicker” (there's gotta be a better term for this)
✔ Turn on and test mics/speakers if needed (we only used them for events with 50+ attendees due to the acoustics in our space)
✔ Set up and arrange folding chairs, ensure you leave plenty of room for wheelchair/mobility aid access between chairs, and distribute some larger chairs in the mix where possible
✔ Set up food table and drink area (I recommend covering your tables with craft paper which looks great and makes cleanup a cinch, and buying 3 beverage buckets like these)
✔ Ice the drink buckets an hour before doors open (place drinks in buckets first, pour ice over after - trust me 😂)
✔ If you’re distributing t-shirts and stickers, lay them out neatly at a table towards the back of the room (away from food)
✔ Prepare laptops/iPads with Eventbrite or Tito accounts/lists open and ready for check-in at the check-in area near the entrance
✔ Layout name tags, sharpies, pronoun button/stickers in check-in area for attendees
✔ Brief any attending employees to be on extra high alert for attendee happiness, and if anyone seems to be running into trouble, to interject or report it to a moderator

30 minutes prior to the event:

✔ Breathe and have a glass of water. Try to take a moment to eat before the guests arrive because I promise you won't eat if you don't eat now. If anything is going to go wrong, and it probably will, you can handle it. 🙌
✔ If videographer was hired, they should be arriving and setting up
✔ If possible, playing some great, low-volume instrumental ice-breaking music for guest arrival (lyric-free ensures you won’t run into any sexist/racist/triggering lyrics! Jazz is always classy!)

✔ Cover any snack/drink/other areas that aren’t accessible to guests
✔ Catering should be arriving now
✔ Ensure food is set up and looks yummy and clean
✔ Important: Ensure all food is labeled with dietary specifics/allergens (contains gluten/gluten-free, contains shellfish, contains egg, contains milk/dairy, contains nuts, vegan/contains animal products). Most caterers will label for you if you ask, but you may need to label items yourself. If you’re unsure, always assume the food may contain an allergen.
✔ Check-in volunteers should get into place and open doors 10 mins before event kickoff for early arrivals

EVENT KICKOFF!

✔ It's the moment we've all been waiting for! Open those doors! ✨
✔ Check-in and welcome guests!
✔ Be on extra high alert for attendee happiness, and if anyone seems to be running into trouble, interject or report it to a moderator
✔ If you have been the driving force behind the event, now's the time to mix, mingle, and network... enjoy the fruits of your labor, and let your volunteers be the ones managing the event details. You've worked hard and you deserve it
✔ Your volunteers should be:

Ensuring anyone who looks shy or lonely gets welcomed and introduced to someone
Replenishing drinks/ice
Handling any spills/messes
Tossing empty bottles/cans into recycling as the event is underway

Tasklist: End of Event

✔ Clean up- all bottles/cans
✔ Empty any overflowing garbage/recycling/compost
✔ If possible and food will not spoil overnight, consider having a Food Runner collect any leftover food the next day to be redistributed to the homeless
✔ If applicable, fold up chairs and store them
✔ Ensure office/space is secured before leaving
✔ Make sure to take the time to express your appreciation to your volunteers, either through a small gift, a Slack shout-out, or some other form of recognition!

Tasklist: Follow-up/Post-Event

✔ You should send a followup email to thank your attendees for coming. You can do this through Eventbrite or Tito
✔ If your event was recorded, it’s usually nice to wait until you receive the recording to send to your attendees
✔ Consider having the recording transcribed through Rev.com, this helps tremendously in writing a recap
✔ Consider writing a blog post recap on your company blog! Unfortunately, since Keen IO was acquired, my event recaps are no longer live on the Keen blog. Here's a super old tumblr we used to use at Mashery for all our hackathon recaps. Don't tell anyone it's still live 😂

Now, pat yourself on the back. You did great!

Am I missing anything? What would you add? Comment below and I'll add it!

Thanks to Perry Eising for more resources for gender inclusivity at events, as well as helping me to consider the needs of folks using mobility aids

Was this post helpful? Want the spreadsheet version of this task list to run your own inclusive office event? Message me and I'll hook you up!

How Dev Spaces Should Fit Into Your Developer Community Mix

Sarah-Jane Morris — Tue, 21 May 2019 13:58:37 +0000

NB: This post was originally published on Vanilla Forums' Blog on May 16th, 2019
Cover image by Con Karampelas on Unsplash

Managing your own developer community spaces is enough of a challenge, so how do some of the most successful platform companies approach developer magnets like Stack Overflow and Reddit, and how do they decide whether or not to join in or let developers collaborate on their own in these spaces?

Start Simple: Set up Alerts

Atlassian and Slack both stress the importance of setting up basic alerts to monitor their community. Neil Mansilla, Head of Developer Experience at Atlassian, uses a combination of Google Alerts and alerts he set up directly from Stack Exchange, the parent site of Stack Overflow. (Tristan Sokol, Developer Evangelist at Square, wrote this detailed article last year all about Stack Overflow, for those keen to learn more about this platform)

Elizabeth Kinsey, Developer Marketing Manager at Slack, explained that in Slack's case, developer channels like Stack Overflow are managed through an internal integration. Perhaps unsurprisingly their internal integration is a Slack channel called “Slack Overflow” populated by Slack's DevRel team. Whenever a Stack Overflow question is tagged with the keyword “Slack”, the team is alerted directly through the channel, enabling them to see it and respond.

Elizabeth continued that Slack’s Devrel team doesn't have a hard and fast rule about when they'll jump into Stack Overflow when a question is tagged “Slack”, but they'll follow general trends around developer interactions with their questions. What they've noticed lately are fewer beginner questions than previous years and more specific questions. Perhaps in Slack's case, this is a reflection of their consistent developer product information channels as well as their maturing platform. They've also seen questions being answered by developers within the community much more quickly, so they've learned to ease off answering the questions too quickly themselves.

These basic alerts save teams from needing to parse through endless external mentions and forum conversations, allowing them to quickly identify the questions that they’ll help support versus the ones they'll leave to the community to tackle together.

“Proceed With Caution”: Welcome to the Wild West

Photo by Andre Ouellet on Unsplash

Liz Couto, Developer Product Marketing Manager at Shopify explained that while her team monitors the main external dev communities like Stack Overflow and Reddit (and in Shopify's case, there are a number of developer-run Facebook groups), they also proceed with a high level of caution when deciding whether or not to participate.

Liz notes, “participation creates expectation”, which she claims is a crucial point when it comes to deciding whether or not to jump into external communities. Letting developers collaborate in those spaces without the expectation of your participation maintains the expectation that developers should rely on your official company channels.

“Once you've dabbled in responses in a specific community, but then you suddenly drop off, you'll really impact developer trust and dilute the importance of your sanctioned communities where developers can expect to get an official company answer.” - Liz Couto, Shopify

Finally, Stack Overflow and Reddit don't have the best track records for being inclusive and welcoming. While there are efforts to change that, relying solely upon either of these external communities for developers to find support comes with a chance of taking on some of that negative sentiment.

Too Much Noise from the Outside? Check your Channels

It is crucial it is to be consistent with your official developer community information channels and response flows. If your developers don't feel that they're getting the updates, information and help they need from within the community, that's when you'll hear from them outside the community.

Developers will absolutely take it to Twitter, to company support channels outside of dev rel, to Reddit and to Stack Overflow when they're frustrated. This can give developers considering building on your platform pause, and potentially deplete your community trust battery. That being said, every developer community is on a journey, navigating its own highs and lows. Liz from Shopify tells us a rewarding tale of staying off Reddit but keeping a watchful eye on it:

"One feature that Shopify developers have been asking for for years has been the ability to respond to merchant reviews within the app store. Shopify developers had been up in arms about this for so long, and there was a years-old and still active Reddit thread all about it. So Shopify monitors but typically stays off of Reddit. The team was therefore aware of the thread. A few months ago Shopify's platform team, to the excitement of many, finally released the ability for developers to actually reply to merchant app reviews and the community actually took upon themselves to update this contentious Reddit thread! A happy ending and a demonstration of community commitment through thick and through thin." - Liz Couto, Shopify

As we’ve seen, external communities need not become a full-time focus for your devrel team. Keeping tabs on these communities can help gauge how well you’re communicating to your developers through official channels, but don’t feel obligated to jump in on long, heated threads. You’ll often find your developers collaborate among themselves, self-correct and manage external communities for you.

When to Join Developer Community Conversations and When to Lay Low

Sarah-Jane Morris — Mon, 06 May 2019 20:52:20 +0000

NB: This post was originally published on Vanilla Forums' Blog on April 30th, 2019
Cover image by Cam Bowers on Unsplash

In the last post in this series, we illustrated some of the beneficial outcomes of a collaborative developer community. But how, and when, as a devrel or representative of your company, should you step aside, join in, or stoke the community fire? Our friends at Slack, Shopify, Stoplight and Atlassian have some answers.

Go with the flow: Creating Reliable Community Product Channels

Developers typically participate in communities to stay informed and inspired. Clear and consistent sources of information ensure developers know where to go when they have questions. In creating developer communication channels such as clear and well vetted docs, API changelogs, developer newsletters, forums, Stack Overflow and more, your community trust battery will grow as developers know where to look when they have questions.

By leading these channels, keeping them updated consistently and reiterating their presence and location to your community, you’ll be able to offset the number of places necessary to monitor community activity. Shopify, Atlassian, Slack and Stoplight have all made concerted efforts to let their community know where they’ll be available for questions and when developers will need to rely on each other to hash things out. Each company has a slightly different approach on when to step in and when to step aside.

Neil Mansilla, Head of Developer Experience at Atlassian, has his full team on their developer community forums, every single day. “It's on all of my team members' calendars,” he says. “There are certain areas of specialty or certain sub forums or sub topics that they kind of gravitate towards but generally what we don't want to happen is that just questions go unanswered.”

Developers know they’ll get sanctioned answers on Atlassian’s forums. Community-led spaces like Atlasssian’s marketplace vendor Slack community, where there are no Atlassian employees, are clearly places for the community to hash things out amongst each other. This distinction allows the Atlassian Developer Experience team to be responsive within their available bandwidth and maintain community trust.

Liz Couto, Developer Product Marketing Manager at Shopify, stresses the importance of not over-segmenting communication channels based on internal developer definitions. Developers dabble throughout ecosystems, and as Liz says, the trick is to be there for them when they hit valleys while building. “Developers will use what works for them, “ Liz says. “And I think for me those valleys are what we have to watch out for. How do we bounce them back up and get them building again?”

“Distance to the Frontline”

Photo by Fré Sonneveld on Unsplash

All of the community teams I spoke to have different ways to ensure community questions are answered and internal teams are connecting to the external developer community.

Neil from Atlassian already told us that being on the forums is a daily must for his team, but external communities like Stack Overflow are not a requirement. The same applies to Shopify.

Shopify, however, has gone above and beyond, creating a program called “Distance to the Frontline.” Liz says, “It’s a program where we're all (the Platform Product service line, regardless of title) mandated to actually go to the frontline and spend time with either merchants or partners once a month.” Shopify’s frontline is all of their community spaces - meetups and events, merchant support call shadowing, or community forums. “I love the fact that they're willing to have those open conversations in front of us,” says Liz. “And I find it's really helpful that they have that comfort level and will give us that real preview into how they feel about our products.”

Slack does not have a dedicated online forum. They rely on Stack Overflow to support developer questions. In fact, they have an aptly and comically named internal channel called “Slack Overflow” where all “Slack”-tagged questions on Stack Overflow flow in and alert the DevRel team, ensuring all questions are answered promptly. They are finding, however, as the Slack developer program grows, the number of questions answered by external developers increases, as does the complexity of the questions themselves. Elizabeth Kinsey, Developer Marketing Manager at Slack, says, “There are fewer questions about basics. There's fewer questions about, what should I build? Or why should I build? And it's more about I got stuck with this one thing. How do I get around this one thing?”

Stoplight, an API design tool that is in the earlier stages of building out their developer community, is still in the process of defining the official community support channels and reinforcing them with the community. Taylor Barnett, Lead Community Engineer at Stoplight says, “A lot of people still go to our Intercom (a support tool based on on-site messaging). We're still trying to figure out what is a good way to introduce the forum. I'm trying to really build up that trust.”

Unexpected Developer Community Touchpoints

While forums, meetups and external communities like Stack Overview can be more obvious touchpoints for developer communities, it’s important to ensure you’re monitoring and creating a response plan for all the places where your developers can interface with your platform.

While chatting community metrics with Neil from Atlassian, it was surprising to hear him mention documentation, a touch-point that’s fairly unique to developer communities. “We react to metrics, like the number of docs tickets people are submitting to us. It feels good to go in there and correct the mistakes or make it better but if it's systemic issue within the company, in which we're just not keeping things up to date, or we're pushing new features but not necessarily documenting them to the level that is useful for our community, that's a metric and signal for us."

Both Liz from Shopify and Elizabeth from Slack stressed the importance of paying attention to email. It may be a one-to-one touch point, but responses to mass emails can showcase community sentiment. Shopify’s email team recently included a quick survey link in a developer newsletter, and this simple addition elicited a surprisingly good response from the stereotypically marketing-averse developer community. “Our email open rate was fantastic and our click through rate was too. And all the email marketers have looked at that and been quite shocked at how high that email rate is. We attribute that to a really engaged group and the importance of actively asking them their opinions.”

If you want your developers to work more closely together in your community, you’ll sometimes need to shepard them. Consistent communication channels, signalling trust, building connections and looking for community wherever developers gather in your community spaces, both online and off, are crucial to ensure they can support each other and make a difference in your ecosystem. In our next post, we’ll break down different approaches to external developer communities like Reddit and Stack Overflow, vs. internal forums and discussion groups.

How Collaboration Can Strengthen Your Developer Community

Sarah-Jane Morris — Fri, 12 Apr 2019 18:13:31 +0000

NB: This post was originally published on Vanilla Forums' Blog on April 9th, 2019

Strong communities consist of supportive members that seek to help, uplift, and see their fellow community members succeed not only as individuals, but also for the collective health of the community.

Sounds pretty great, right? It is!

But what does this kind of community strength look like when it comes to developer and platform communities? Don’t developers just want to build?

To tackle this question, we spoke to developer community experts from companies like Shopify, Atlassian and Stoplight. These experts provide us with some valuable insight on how a collaborative developer community can contribute to an active developer and platform ecosystem and ultimately, a better set of products being built.

This is the first of a series of posts designed to help you understand how you can encourage developer community collaboration, with some tactical advice from the frontlines on approaching collaboration and how to get it off the ground.

We figured a great first start would be to showcase some of these collaboration success stories to illustrate the benefits of a collaborative developer community.

Developers Collaborate in the Name of a Healthier Ecosystem

Safety in Numbers

Platforms like Atlassian count on their ecosystem of developers to build integrations and apps that focus on creating an excellent user experience (UX). In fact, excellent UX is a requirement to be showcased in their app marketplace. Some of Atlassian’s app developers decided to take this to the next level.

Neil Mansilla, Atlassian’s Head of Developer Experience, shared a story of spontaneous collaboration that happened during a recent Atlassian “App Week”. Without prompting, Atlassian devs came together and started doing integration tests with each other’s apps. These apps worked great on their own, but problems emerged with Atlassian customers using multiple apps at once. Atlassian’s devs took it upon themselves to not only test multi-app integrations, they also started releasing their testing frameworks for the community to leverage. All in the name of a faster and healthier platform.

“They're all about how can we have a healthy ecosystem because it just takes a handful of bad app experiences to spoil it for a whole bunch of other people, so I think that that is the ethos here. Let's give back and make sure that this hums along smoothly for everyone.” - Neil Mansilla

Early Wins

Taylor Barnett is the Lead Community Engineer at Stoplight, a platform that helps developers build, test, and improve their web APIs. As opposed to Atlassian, Stoplight is an early-stage startup building out a blossoming developer community.

During our chat, Taylor shared one of her earliest community ‘wins’ with us, which occurred when a member of the Stoplight developer community built a Jenkins plugin for the rest of the community to leverage. The developer in question held a day job as a software architect, so the fact that they chose to give back to an early stage tool symbolized a deep commitment to Stoplight and its future.

“To me, that was really awesome because he comes from a more enterprise-type company, but he's over there debugging things with users. When users ask me for help, I say, "just go post on that thread because I know he will help you." He has, which has been super awesome.” - Taylor Barnett

When Communities Create Communities

image by #WoCinTech Chat

Community-led Slacks

A sure sign that your developers are collaborating is when they take it upon themselves to create their own dedicated community space; this was the case with developers at Atlassian. They created their own marketplace vendor Slack community as a place to hash out relevant topics away from the watchful eye of the company.

This community-led slack group was quite exclusive; so exclusive that even Atlassian employees weren’t in it. Neil says, “We're not invited to it because they want to feel like they can speak openly without reprisals. I haven't asked to be part of it because from what I understand, it's healthy.” NB: We’ll cover the best approaches to community-led spaces in a future post in this series.

In-Person Collaboration

Shopify’s community collaboration is so strong that their developer community is actually self-organizing and has been hosting meetups all over the world for years. These events are entirely organized by Shopify’s partner and developer community members, with some marketing support and guidance from Shopify’s community team.

When Shopify saw that partners and developers were self-organizing, they invested in resources to help these meetups be as successful as possible. Liz Couto, Shopify’s Developer Product Marketing Manager says, “Shopify's developer community works together and is huge on collaboration. They are really amazing at hosting their own meetups for merchants and other fellow partners.”

Community Collaboration through Diversity

Just because developers are leveraging your platform or tool, doesn’t mean they are cut from the same cloth. Both Shopify and Atlassian stress the importance of giving developers space in your community to self-identify, giving them more ways to discover new opportunities to collaborate.

Neil from Atlassian tells us that the majority of Atlassian’s “marketplace millionaires” got started customizing their company instances of Jira or Confluence (both Atlassian workplace tools), but through exposure to other developer stories in the Atlassian developer community, were able to scale their solutions and become more successful.

“There's not a formula to it, but they all definitely touch one another and then in fact if you were to look at the community make up at an in person event, or even online, it is a mish mash of all of those things and at any given moment in time, it's all of them together” - Neil Mansilla

Peak Platform Collaboration

Meta-Platforms

There are some fairly unique and technical ways that developer communities can reach peak collaboration. Shopify’s apps occasionally become platforms of their own. One example is Yotpo, a customer reviews and ratings app, which has APIs that developers can use to build apps that leverage both Yotpo and Shopify data.

Mergers and Acquisitions, Oh My!

The pinnacle of developer collaboration has to be acquisitions. Atlassian has seen their fair share of larger ecosystem apps buying up newer apps with potential. According to Neil, “...there's a little subculture of Atlassian mergers and acquisitions within the ecosystem which is pretty awesome.”

Dev to Dev Mentorship

Finally, just because a developer community collaboration doesn’t directly impact the overall speed and scalability of a platform, or result in a million-dollar acquisition, doesn’t mean it doesn’t have tremendous value. Liz from Shopify shares a story that recently came out of the Shopify community and reminded her what a fantastic place it was:

“I have one great example of a Shopify dev that builds that custom store experiences, that also loves building apps but hasn’t been as involved with them lately. They found some wonderful recent university graduates in the community who love building apps, and they've chosen to mentor them. We see amazing stuff like that sometimes where developers have the skills and interest but not the bandwidth, so they'll live vicariously through other developers by supporting them” - Liz Couto

Collaboration is Key for Developer Community Health

image by #WoCinTech Chat

Developers can be as collaborative as other community members, but their motivations can be different. App performance and ecosystem health are some of the more obvious end goals we’ve seen in this post, but we’ve also seen developers come together and give back in the form of mentorship and open source contributions. Creating opportunities for developers to collaborate for any of these reasons will lead to a better product and community.

In the next post, we’ll be helping you understand how to sow the seeds of developer community engagement - when should your team jump in on developer conversations, and when should you let them play out?

Stop, Collaborate and Listen (to your devs) on April 17th

Sarah-Jane Morris — Wed, 27 Mar 2019 20:01:47 +0000

This was originally posted on my medium but I thought Dev.to readers might like to see it as well… mainly because it’s such a silly way to invite you to get some really tactical advice on developer community building.

Stop, Collaborate and Listen (to your devs) on April 17th

As I started to put this post together, something hilarious and borderline weird hit me… there’s a perfect anthem for what I want to share today:

Why is this (very) early 90s jam by the artist born Robert Matthew Van Winkle so perfect? A few reasons:

It immediately lets you know how old I am
I’ll be speaking at a virtual workshop on April 17th for Vanilla I recently moved back to very ICE-y Montreal
The first two words of this song (“alright” doesn’t count OK?): The virtual workshop I’m speaking at is all about how developers should Stop (and) Collaborate… with each other in their communities...
...And Listen is the name of the developer community consultancy I just founded after years of building inclusive developer communities for tech companies!

I’m super excited to not subject you to Vanilla Ice on April 17th, but here’s what you will learn if you join us:

How do you encourage dev to dev support from day one of community building?
When to jump into developer community conversations, and when to lay low
Approaches to monitoring and engaging with proprietary developer communities (online communities, docs, etc) vs. external developer communities (Stack Overflow, Reddit, etc)
Stories of successful developer community collaborations: from bug fixes, to hires, to business building

This workshop should be especially interesting to folks who work with developer communities. If you’re in a developer relations or developer advocacy role definitely join us! However, anyone who works with developer communities will get something out of this.

If you’ve got a (dev community collaboration) problem, I’ll solve it:

Anything you want me to address in the workshop? Hit me up!