a dev community where people are scared to ask questions is not a community~

a dev community where people are scared to ask questions is not a community~

i run the community spaces for a charity in the developer education space if people are not comfortable asking questions the entire thing falls apart

so like it is not just making people feel welcome and comfortable and happy but it is also ensuring that the friction of participating does not outweigh the benefits

in our industry it is especially important to be cognisant of this because like we have a history of gatekeeping and treating knowledge like its wealth or something yknow how sometimes the way new developers are met is with condescension

anyway communities that wanna be chill vibes still end up with vibes that are kinda hostile towards the next generation a lil so i encourage you to keep that in mind~

so how do we fix it naomi well that is a very good question lets do some ideation!!!

my first thought is that having a strong (volunteer) moderation team who can help address the more hostile or aggressive developer feedback to ease some of the internal tensions that we face would be a huge boon

strong and explicit community policy is a must like you gotta have a good code of conduct and such but also your team need to embody that policy they gotta walk the walk with consistent and effective moderation and talk the talk in the way they conduct their interactions in the community

depending on how many your community is you may benefit from having dedicated spaces for the newer generation of developers to ask their questions in a judgement free space without having to see the seniors asking much more complex questions if that makes sense

naomi we have kpis and some other thing we have to do numbers!!!! okay that is fine let me help you do some numbers~

first one is member retention - more specifically, what percentage of your members who ask their first help question return to ask another????

second one is community driven engagement - are the help questions being answered by community members before you can even respond?????

and how about your diversity in participants especially across skill levels (and marginalised identities of course) are the folks who are oft under-represented more equally distributed in your demographics?????????

without these in place your community will never be able to thrive~