Building a dedicated tech community is one sure way to hit your goal, whether it is building traction around your product or just trying to ensure that you have people to interact with as a nonprofit trying to create impact and help people. It is usually a lot easier to start a community than people think.
The hard part? Keeping it engaged and going is where the difference comes in.
However, before we go ahead, what is a community?
"A community is a group of people with something in common."
A tech community then becomes a group of people with a similar interest in the technology space.
For most folks, keeping a set of people from different backgrounds and with different aspirations engaged might not be so easy to do, but that is not something they exclusively have to think about. Keeping a buzzing tech community going involves considering a few things before starting, when you have started, keeping it running, and expanding it.
So, what are the things you need to consider when building a tech community?
Let’s check them out.
- Address a real problem
- Target the right demographics
- Take responsibility
- Listen
- Network
- Ask for help
- Connect with community leaders
- Create partnerships
- Redefine community
- Share your community impact
Address a real problem
At the risk of contradicting myself, I’ll just state that you do not necessarily need to address a problem before you start your tech community, but you do need something or call it a sense of purpose to keep them together.
Ideally, the best way to keep a community of tech enthusiasts together is to be addressing a problem they are facing together or addressing a need, a cause, or an issue they want to work on. Whatever you choose to move forward with, ensure that you have a purpose to keep them going when you start the community. It makes it easier for people, especially in the tech space where attention span is short.
Target the right demographics
Like in business and building a product, you can’t build a product for everyone. It also applies to communities as well. You cant start a community to solve the problem for everyone. Eventually, you are going to run into issues. One way to solve this is to ensure your community has a target audience in mind. This is where you employ a little bit of design thinking when starting your community. Assess the tech space where you are.
For example, in Nigeria, the demand for React developers is high, and the corresponding supply isn’t there. To address this, you may want to start a community for React Developers with a few to address the skills gap by getting industry leaders or React developers willing to volunteer their time to mentor beginners through a structured learning path.
This example has a particular target audience in mind, and it makes it easier to have an impact in the lives of your target audience.
Take responsibility
I find it difficult to understand why some people shy away from responsibilities. From my experience, being responsible for something or a project is one of the best to grow as an individual. The idea of being responsible for your community should be paramount to you as the founder or as part of the founding team.
To a considerable extent, you should try and ensure the growth of every individual in your community. Be responsible for their development, find out where they have bottlenecks and what you can do to address the challenges they may have. How can you contribute to help them scale through that challenge and emerge more robust and seasoned.
Taking responsibility for the growth, welfare, and design of your community is something that should be taken into consideration.
Maybe I should have made this number one on the list sef.
Listen
Easy to do, right? Not really, at least not from my interaction with people over the years.
If you do decide to have a community, one thing you must keep at the back of your mind is that you must listen to members of your community. Granted, you can’t satisfy the wants and needs of everyone in your community, but to a vast extent, you should listen to what the people in your neighborhood are saying.
The outcome of listening to your people? You get a community where people feel they belong and are vested in its growth.
Network
Networking is one of the surest ways to ensure that your connection grows and you have more impact. For someone who is looking out to create a community in tech or keep one buzzing, networking is one sure way to ensure that the impact you have is sustained over a long period. Networking gives you access to people and resources to help your community grow directly or indirectly.
The crazy thing about networking is that it is not a one-time thing but a continuous process throughout your community's life cycle.
Ask for help
I sincerely hope you don’t shy away from asking for help. Initially, when I became the branch director for a youth-led NGO in my city, working with the alumni body felt like a game of who got the biggest to lose. This was primarily due to my ego and fear of being rejected or turned down when I asked for help. Over time, I realized that if you never ask for help, there’s no guarantee that you will get the help.
A course I took on LinkedIn Learning earlier this year had a key phrase that stuck with me
If you are not comfortable asking for help, be intentional about asking someone for help with someone at least 10 times a week for two weeks. After the second week, it becomes easier for you to ask for help. As the famous saying goes, a closed mouth is a closed destiny.
Building a community is not easy, and you’re going to need help along the way with keeping it running. You will need a core team and another peripheral team to handle some of the daily activities when you are indisposed to respond to them.
Connect with community leaders
When networking, you should keep in mind to network and connect with other community leaders. It is a given that you will not know everything you need to run your community successfully. You will need to know the possible pitfalls to avoid and how best to navigate a few of the challenging issues that may arise in managing a community. For example, you might need to get a few good case practices (GCPs) from successful tech community leaders. A good example is the core team of the Open Source Community Africa.
Create partnerships
No man is an island. The same can be said of communities. A community depends on partnership for growth and impact to a considerable extent. Having the right skills to negotiate partnerships and bring rewarding benefits to your community could spur the development of the community exponentially.
Share your community Impact
Getting new members into your community comes in different ways, and the most effective is word of mouth(referral) or through shared impact. If you want to keep a buzzing tech community going, the chances are that you will need to communicate your impact with the public regularly. Share the success stories: the outreach programs you have and a lot more with the public. People are fundamentally attracted to success, and the more success stories that come out of your community, the more people will want to be a part of it.
This list is not exhaustive, but it gives an essential guide for those who wish to keep their communities thriving and on the right path. Giving back to the ecosystem that has helped you in some way is gratifying on its own, especially when you start seeing success stories out of your community.
“If you aren’t already an active participant in any tech communities, I invite you to belong, to contribute to open source, to attend meetups, to develop a habit of giving back to the community in any form (blogs, vlogs, etc.)”
Do you have any other insight that should be considered when building and managing a tech community?
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