Kong Kong Summit 2022, 11 Nov 2022

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From YouTube: How to Grow and Nourish Tech Communities with Daliya Spasova | #KongSummit22

Description

Growing tech communities is surprisingly similar to caring for plants: each community (and plant) is unique and needs different care. If you struggle to keep a cactus alive, it can be daunting - but don’t panic! In this interactive session, Daliya Spasova, Community Manager, Kong will share four things you can do to help any tech community thrive. There will even be swag for those willing to answer some brain teasers!

1. We’ll begin with planting seeds — where and how you can start getting involved with your local tech communities.
2. We’ll discuss a framework for nurturing tech communities as they sprout.
3. As your community takes root, it needs tending to if it’s going to flourish. For this, Daliya will showcase some community maintenance techniques.
4. Finally, even green thumbs need the right tools to keep a garden growing season over season.

You will learn the essentials for sustaining a healthy community in the long run. Throughout this talk, you will get real-world recommendations on how to successfully expand your community while getting practical examples of community programs run in Kong that have helped drastically grow a healthy and curious community.

A

Hello, everyone welcome we're at the last day, the last hour two hours, so I'm not gonna. Keep you here, 30 minutes. Don't worry um we're here today to talk how we can grow and nourish oopsie Tech communities.

A

um But what you don't know is that we're also here to talk about gardening and you're, probably going to be very shocked why gardening?

A

um But what we're going to find out from today's presentation is that growing and nourishing your communities is very similar to gardening, so I'll use some phrases to make it a little bit more interesting, and so you can relate it also um so yeah, let's get started um before we begin with the most basic step. Planting seeds. I'll tell you a little bit about myself, where I am where I'm from what I currently do and what I also like to do for fun.

A

um Then we'll begin with the most basic step: planting seeds afterwards we're going to carrying because every Garden, obviously you need to care for it. If your plants are going to flourish, the same for communities in step, three we'll establish a framework. What you can do to maintain your communities and after that, we'll summarize everything for a recipe for success and, lastly, we're finish off by how we can measure the growth of our communities all right, so my name is Dalia I currently live in London I'm.

A

Officially, originally from Bulgaria I've lived all around I used to swim professionally, so I used to be in the United States for a little bit after that in Amsterdam for a while and now I'm in London, that's my dog Maggie, a sweet little poem um I currently work as a community manager at Kong I. Do everything related to developer engagement? So how do we raise awareness for our products? How do we make the adoption of our products projects easier and how do we keep our developer? Community engaged and happy um I, obviously like to swim.

A

I do like to hike, explore new places, new Cuisines, so you'll find me traveling. Quite often, all right, let's get going so we'll begin with the first and most basic step, planting seeds right! That's what you do when you want to start a garden and before I tell you where you can plant your seeds. I want to briefly mention those three pillars for community building.

A

I believe that anyone who wants to build any sort of communities open source, not open source, whatever you need to be aware of them, especially for open source um I'll, give you an analogy here. So, just like the health of the soil. When you start um you know, gardening is increasingly related to the health of the plants. Right, if you so soil, it's not good. Your plants are probably not going to grow in case of the cone Community.

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Our user base is kind of our soil right, they're developers, the system, administrators, the security folks, everyone our users, so if they're happy Kong will be successful right so remember your base, remember where you came from. Did your projects originated in the open source Community?

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um If yet, if, yes, that's a bottom-up engagement, we Empower those who use our technology. So that's important to remember, and lastly, who is part of your community. Is it only the open source users, the developers or is it also the customers, the partners, the influencers? So you need to make sure who you're talking to because the messaging will vary depending on who is part of your community.

A

So before you start gardening, you need to Green the space. You need to prepare the space where you're going to be planting. Your seeds and the seeds which we will be planting, are Community programs and community events, Community programs and community events are the two major ways through which you can build. Tech communities globally and I will be primarily focusing on user programs, contributor programs and Ambassador programs and for community events, I mean there are many types but we'll just focus on meetups conferences and hackathons. Briefly,.

A

I want to very briefly mention how important it is to have a social media presence around everything you do. You might have the best and most engaging Community program or the most interesting event happening, but if you don't have a consistent social media presence, it's just not not going to work, so you need to be showing up for your community very consistently, not just one off, because they just won't.

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Remember you- and you will hear the word Cadence here many times through this presentation, but just remember everything you do put it out there because yeah, if you don't, people are just not going to remember and show up so for this analogy here you can see for user programs. The leaves are quite small right. So these are. These are programs I refer to like um you can we can say, like writing, a blog post or hosting a Meetup, all those fall under user programs. So that's like having a grass in your garden.

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You need many of those um in order to build a community right. You need a consistent flow of things happening the same with the garden. You want a green space. You don't just want like one plant somewhere, then we move into contributor program. You can see the leaves are starting to become a little bit bigger.

A

When you have, and um you know, working user programs, then you move to you can start building contributor programs for them to create more engagement in your community and later on, the ambassador program you can see the leaves are the biggest that's only for the rock stars in the community, so that's kind of like having a roses in your garden. It's only for the Masters same for the meetups. You do a lot of them. Sorry for the event same for meetups, you do a lot of them. You only focus on several conferences.

A

You can't do that many and then the hackathons just for the engaged Community um only you know when um when the time is right and when you have yeah, for example, the hackathon we did here was for Kong Summit, so pick something and you do around it: okay, so user programs, let's see how we can raise awareness for our open source projects when I create a user program. I like to start by asking myself: what are the goals for my program?

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Why do I want to create it and in most cases, user programs are geared towards the following, so attracting new users and raising awareness about your products or projects, educating the community about everything that you're doing and making sure you know, the adoption of your products is easier, creating smooth onboarding process for the new users and then maintaining a great users experience and providing ongoing support.

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I mean you might be educating and raising awareness, but if you don't have the proper support and or if the community members don't know where to find it, it's just not going to work. So you need to have all those in place and then we will Deep dive a little bit here on this Slide. The same information so at the awareness stage, focus on the problem that you're trying to solve, and then we turn into educational content right.

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So if a developer is running into a problem and they will Google almost like, you know how can I solve it? So what are these terms? That is that Google is providing for you, so you want to focus on those right. How can you help the developer? Community solve their problems, so this is most likely what you want to focus on, because the developer Community wants to get the answers from you.

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So once you figure that out what are these terms that they're looking for you want to create content, so you want to create blog posts, videos. You want to speak at events. You want to do SEO optimized website, all of those and once you start creating that content, reuse, it and reuse it again. They need to hear it multiple times, multiple, multiple and once you start doing all of that, you need to create a smooth onboarding process, and then you move all the way to the support.

A

You know create documentation, make sure to know the community where to look for those answers so, for example, with Kong um once we start on boarding new users, we send them a five-step email sequence to help them get onboarded, so think what you can do to make it easier for your new users.

A

So now we have running user programs. So how can we engage better with the community with the people who are using your products? What can you do for them? You might want to create a contributor program, but before you do figure out the, why that's extremely important? Why do you need contributors? So are they crucial to your project or do you need them to engage with your communities to create Community engagement or do you need them for both? So that's what we have at Kong. Our contributors contribute to our GitHub repos.

A

So they help us build our projects, but they also help us engage with our community, so they write blog posts. They speak at events, so we need our contributors for both, but you know, for you might not be the same. So think. Why do you need them and then the way you structure your program will depend a lot on that? Why so you first need to figure out what you need, your contributors for and from there you can start building your contributor pipeline.

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So first you will obviously look into your existing user, who is already using your technology. So you obviously asked them to participate in the program from there. You can look into the adjacent communities. So, for example, Kong is built up on Lua and open resties, so we get a lot of contributors coming from there. So think. Do you have any underlying technology that you can um ask people to participate um Partners? So we also collaborate with a lot of our partners. So do you have any partners that you can?

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You know mutually benefit from both of your communities, students in academics? You know that, for example, hackathons are an amazing way to get them involved with technology. So can can you collaborate with any Universities high schools to get them interested in technology? Once you start building the pipeline, then you need to think what processing processes and programs you can create to support those contributors right. You can't just create the program. You need to make sure you have the proper support. So. You need a contributor guide where you need to outline everything related to the contributions.

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So how can they contribute where what support resources everything you need to include there? You also need to have a clear review process. So how are you reviewing the contributions if it's rejected? Why? Maybe someone will reach out to you and ask you, so you need to be able to answer those questions places to get help. Of course, if they get stuck, they need to know who to to who to ask for help and recognition.

A

Everyone loves to be recognized, so you need to make sure you recognize the people who contribute to your projects and I will show you what we do here at Kong now. So this is our contributor program. This is the website. If you want to visit it, we structure it in two ways. So, firstly, we have code contributions, so our contributors can contribute to con Gateway, Kuma, Kik or insomnia, and if the contributions are accepted, we send them a t-shirt. So we designed those t-shirts specifically for each project. This is just an idea.

A

Obviously you can do something else, but here it's it creates sort of like a friendly competition. A lot of our contributors want to to collect all those Force t-shirts, so it works very well for us. They love the t-shirts and then the second part is the content contribution which this is a very new part of the program, so we're still developing it. But this is the beauty of creating your own program. You can customize, it add to it.

A

Remove Parts whenever you want so, for example, I'm still thinking well, we can up to the 100 points. That's why it's so empty. If you have any ideas, let me know, but you can see 10 25, 50, 100 points and for all of them, for example, they can share on social media. They can submit a talk related to Kong or any of our products. They can write a blog post Etc so for everything they do.

A

They get points and in the end of the month uh we send them a code which they can then redeem in our portal and get whatever they want um and they ordered themselves, which is it's pretty cool um and they seem to love it so yeah just an idea what you can do for your program and then moving on to the ambassadors program. So now you have an Engaged community and you need to start thinking.

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What can you do for the rock stars in your community right through very active contributors who are contributing all the time?

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So I will be referencing here at Kong Champions program, which is our ambassadors program, and we have how many champions here, one two three four in the audience supporting, um so there are frequent contributors who play a key role in developing and engaging with our community before you develop an ambassador's program for yourself. You again need to ask yourself: why do you need it? What are you trying to achieve?

A

um And you obviously need to set the goals for the program so for us and for many of the ambassadors out there? These are you know kind of the standard goals that the Ambassador from tries to achieve. You want to build awareness for your technology. You want to educate the community right because we have a devil team. Let's say a five to ten people, that's not enough!

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We need more people there advocating for our technology, so the ambassadors they help advocate for our technology out there, educating the community, increasing the contributions to your projects and creating professional development opportunities. So that's a good one. It's not only about us, so we can't just ask them. You know you need to do this and Advocate. We also want to provide something for them. So if they ask for free training or free coaching, or can you review my blog posts, you know Etc, that's the time off, that we take from engineering or devrel.

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So we try to provide something back and it's kind of a two-way street. Once you set the goals, you can then start building up the community for the Champions program or the ambassadors program. You will obviously first reach out to the rock stars, so the active contributors that you already know that they're there and ask them, do you want to be a part most likely? They will say yes and then don't reinvent the wheel focus on something that's already working.

A

So there are a ton of ambassadors program out there, you're not probably not going to come with something. That's majorly different, establish something that's already working and then tweak it to what makes sense for your company establish a value proposition. So what I just mentioned make sure you provide something back to them, because you can't just expect them to do something for you. So it needs to be a two-way street and promote the program and build a pipeline of Champions.

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So you know the regular social media promotion and also think of cool ways through which you can engage with them and promote the program, and here I will show you what we did so in honor of Kong Summit. Every year we give our champion some presents, and this year we decided to go non-material stuff. So we adopted a gorilla on behalf of each one of them and we send them the adoption certificates.

A

um It was very well received so they're happy, so they will talk about it and then we also wrote a blog post about it, which we weren't really focused on the technology per se. Everyone knows what Kong does. Everyone knows what an ambassador program is, but we spoke about how our program differs from the rest, so we focus on the people right, we're humble we're a family. You know this is how we differ from the all the other MVP programs out there.

A

So I think what you can say to make it different it doesn't you know it doesn't have to be something like again. You don't have to reinvent the wheel, just think what makes sense for you and from your company, so that was the big part, but now we'll focus on community events and I will not go into too much detail for each one.

A

But I want to mention that we'll just talk about these three types and for meetups, that's mainly for awareness, you do them locally, you have them all around the globe, maybe in different languages, but in most cases 99 of the case is therefore spreading awareness about your product. They are not for lead generation for lead generation, you have conferences, you go there, you collect the leads, and it's purely like a sales.

A

um You know event and then the hackathons. Therefore, engagement um also a great way to involve students and academics, so think about that, and also whatever you do, make sure that you talk about all of your products and all of your projects. Don't just focus on one, because you know then you need to and okay, you need to make sure you record most of your recording and most of the meetups or events put them on YouTube or put them somewhere where people can re-watch them, um because a lot of sales.

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Folks, for example, ask us: do you have a recording on this? One of my prospects is asking me, um so that's you know a great way to reuse the content for any of the products or projects that you have so I have a question for you and whoever gets it closer will get one of these.

A

How many groups or meetup groups do you think we have around the globe. Kong made up groups lower up he's very close. Who said that very good? The answer is 80, but all of you three can get there. You go all right, so we have 80 groups, we actually just opened one in Tokyo. Just now, um but having made up groups is extremely important if you want to build any sort of community, because local presenting locally is very important for engaging with the community.

A

Speaking in different languages, for example, the Meetup I have in London will be totally different from the Meetup they have in Hong Kong, for example. It's you know. The culture is solely different. Obviously, the language everything so having presence all around the globe locally is extremely important, and obviously you can't do it everything yourself or your team. So look for local organizers, that's one of our latest initiatives. So do you have any Kong enthusiasts out there who want to help you and be more involved so make them User, Group organizers?

A

So a lot of our user groups are run by Partners or just by Volunteers in the community, and they help us organize meetups. They speak at meetups. So that's a great way to keep the local communities engaged and, just very briefly here we did a hackathon for Kong Summit. It ended yesterday.

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We're gonna announce the winners in about an hour at the awards ceremony, the hackathons, not a lot to say there, though they follow kind of the same structure in most mostly, but you need to think why do you need the hacks on like what are you trying to achieve?

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For example, us we always do it around Kong Summit, because we want to poop on the event with it, and we also gave free tickets to the people who submitted the valid contribution so for you might be something totally different, but think why do you want to organize it here? You can see the cool t-shirt which all participants get with valid contributions, all right. That was a very big first part, but now we have your programs up and running. You have an Engaged community.

A

You need to care for it right in order for the community to be happy and nourished. So here are four things you can do. I said Cadence many times, but it's so important. It's probably one of the most important things. If you want to build communities, you can do things one off. It's just not going to work. So you need to establish Cadence for your events and you need to communicate regularly with all of your with all of your community organizers and the most active members.

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So they need to know that you're there for to answer any questions they have. You need to nurture the community so nurture the relationships with them right, you're, not a sales, so you're not there to sell anything to them, you're there to help them be successful and educate them and give back. If you can, there are many local conferences which don't have budgets. If you can sponsor them, go speak, um you know, attend organize yourself and then measure keep it in a manageable size. I'll talk this on the next slide measure. Success. So keep it.

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You know monthly, quarterly, make sure you measure uh doesn't do the numbers go up of your community members. If not, you need to look at the reasons why why not and then share share practice best practices with your community members with so yeah with your community members or with fellow Community managers um between yourselves yeah and give feedback.

A

We will quickly mention these three best practices for maintenance and that's very much related to gardening. So the first one revive, let's say: You're Gonna two week business trip you come back and you see your plants are pretty much dead. So are you going to revive them or you're? Just you know like okay, it doesn't matter, I'll buy a new one, so the same goes for commute for user groups. So let's say you have a region that is just not performing like you see. No one is showing up to your meetups.

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The group is dead, there's no activity there. So you put the effort to revive it, or do you just close it? So sometimes the region is just not ready for any activity and that's okay. It will be ready, maybe in a couple years, but then put your effort somewhere else. So if, if you have groups like that, we just closed like 20 or 30 groups last year, which just didn't make any sense so think where you should focus your attention and, like I, said, find local community organizers. Then you literally make half of your.

A

They will do half of your job for the events. It's it's it's great um and then obviously you establish your relationship with them. You invite them to participate in more of your projects and then you they become advocate for your company as well. So propagate I, don't know if you know what it means in gardening terms, it means creating a plan from an existing plant.

A

So if you I already mentioned meetups, but there's also external meetups. So if you have like, let's say, Victor wants to go um and present an account meter, but I will also ask him to go and present an external Meetup, because in that way you propagate their Community you're, creating new con fans. You know somewhere else, because you already speak at your meetups, but go to external meetups and Advocate there for calling in the external community and then repot. That means you know, reporting your plans so reuse.

A

The content don't make obviously new content every single time. You create a Content, reuse, it and reuse. It again. We promote, let's say Victor's videos, many many times they get thousands of views, but then people learn about the technology and everything that he's saying so make sure to reuse the content all right. So, let's see the recipe for Success at the beginning. On Thursday we'll talk about gardening, so you got a little cheeky 101 gardening lesson.

A

So at the beginning, here we have the soil, which are, let's say, the regions or the events so which reasons regions. Do you choose to focus on what events are you going to speak at after that? You want to put water? That's the developer content. Are you providing enough developer content for your community? Is it only very basic stuff, or do you have very advanced stuff? It needs to be a combination of both and it needs to be regular, but also not overwhelmingly like irregular.

A

You don't want to have an event every day right, then you know I'm going to have a attendance of of many people and then containers those are the venues where you're hosting your meetups. You always want to host somewhere cool. Not in like a dingy dark room. You want a nice, a nice fun venue, if possible, a cool venue, fertilizers oops.

A

um So we can look at swag food beverages, all the things that are going to make your event fun and more well attended. Those are the fertilizers and then Pest, Control I'm. Sorry, if there are any sales folks here, no sales pitches at your meetups- it's just not well received I've, had to actually close groups before, because the organizers were so angry that someone went to start pitching the prices and stuff. So it's not well received, don't do it! It's purely for awareness.

A

You know, educating the community and then light provide feedback, always reflect what works for your community, what doesn't in which region. So what works in Europe? Let's say it doesn't work in the Americas or vice versa, so make sure you always reflect on what's going on and then measuring growth. This is how I measure my growth for my community, but obviously you're welcome to do in any other way in five different parts. You start with Community growth, so that's the total growth of all of our channels, so slack LinkedIn Twitter, all of them.

A

There are many of them like 10 or 12., so I measure all the community members there monthly and quarterly than yearly. Then you have Community engagement. So for us that's orbit, we use orbit platform and it does it automatically for us and it tells us how many active members we have how many returning members community activities some members become, not active, and then you can see okay, what can I do or who are these members?

A

Maybe I can you know, send them an email or invite them to participate in one of our events and then the Ambassador contributor program? We see how many applications do we get, how many contributions, how many issues in PRS on GitHub blog post presentations, all that we count how many we've gotten from our Champions or from our contributors and lastly, meetup groups we get um so Kong has 80 groups around the globe so around yeah, thousands and thousands of members. So we see how how many more members do we get per month?

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Are there any months with less compared to others, and we see why what's going on? Did we have less events, so we analyze all that data and we measure it. So this is how I measure my community growth all these five things, but of course you can do it any other way.

A

So with that, I would like to thank you for your attention.