After much encouragement from my friend Tim Anglade — a community organizer that I respect tremendously — I submitted a talk for the Open Source Convention about building community around open source. In the the session I will draw upon my experiences working with the MongoDB community. With OSCON fast approaching, I wanted to explore a few of the topics that I will be discussing at the event.
It’s important to start with a great product, and I can take no credit for the work the 10gen engineering team has done. MongoDB is revolutionary, and it makes life so much easier for developers. And on top of that, the engineering team has done a lot to reduce barriers to entry. For example, installing MongoDB is dead simple. Even I, the non-technical marketing person, was able to install MongoDB in less than five minutes prior to joining 10gen. That’s pretty cool.
Support is a key component of building community. Often support is the first interaction that someone will have with the community, so it’s crucial to make a good first impression. We have built a culture at 10gen that emphasizes our community, to the extent that everyone — from the exec team to the engineering team to the sales team — is monitoring our user forum, Twitter, Stack Overflow, LinkedIn, jira, and more to quickly provide information to those who have questions about MongoDB.
There are many important online channels for the community, but over the past year and half I’ve really learned the value of interacting in person. We do a ton of face-to-face developer outreach, and I have found it to be a great way to get feedback from our users. We organized the first MongoDB conference in San Francisco in April of last year, and we were so excited by the energy that we organized another 20+ MongoDB events around the world.
Conferences bring together the local community of users, and have been a great way to seed local MongoDB User Groups (MUGs). Usually we end up talking about the idea of a MUG over beers after the event. We offer support to the groups by helping to connect local leaders to speakers, covering meetup.com fees, and promoting the sessions. It’s great to see more and more MUGs flourish as the community self-organizes.
I’m excited (and a little nervous!) about giving this talk! Please let me know if you have any suggestions or topics you think I should cover. And if you are interested in attending the session, the details are available on the OSCON website.
