My Journey in Community Building: From Challenging Beginnings to Future Goals
In my previous blog, folks asked to share how my journey in the community begin and how it’s going on. This blog post is all about that…
How did your community-building journey begin?
My community journey began during a challenging period in the fifth year of my career. The community became a source of support, helping me regain my confidence and prove myself. It was during this time that I made the decision to give back to the community. Despite transitioning into a role as a product manager, which is not strictly technical, I continue to organize tech events and contribute to the tech community.
Now I am part of different tech communities like Tech Container, AzConfDev, and CTOtalk apart from “Chennai Azuer User Group”. Recently I received an MVP award from Microsoft that made me feel recognized and encourage to do more.
For someone starting out new in this community field, what advice will you give them?
- Set a base theme for the events you conduct instead of frequently switching between different themes. Continuity helps maintain interest among the audience. For example, I focus on organizing events related to data engineering, regardless of the specific technology.
- Events on hot trends can attract initial attention, but it’s important to provide content that will help attendees’ careers in the longer term as well.
- Collaborate with the speaker that the session will be an end-to-end use-case-based demo which understandable, rather than just flashy command line demos or presentations. Of course, bringing up the right speaker is always important before that.
- Encourage audience and speakers to create a good networking base and enable connections among community members, recognizing that some engineers may be less extroverted.
Can you share the metrics used to measure the success of your community events?
- Track the ratio of new versus existing users attending the events.
- Analyze attendee demographics based on designation, company, etc.
- Evaluate whether the events met attendees’ expectations, gathering feedback through forms and monitoring social media posts from the audience.
- Observe the level of expertise displayed by attendees and notice if the same individuals participate across different types of meetups, such as data engineering or application development.
How do you keep the momentum of your community post the events? Explain a few of your community engagement activities.
- Announce upcoming events to keep the community informed and interested.
- Encourage audience members to become speakers, providing support and guidance for their first speaking experiences.
- Share slides and demo links from the events to allow attendees to revisit and explore the content further.
- Actively respond to queries and provide support to the audience, fostering ongoing engagement.
Building and managing a tech community while fulfilling professional responsibilities can be demanding. However, by dedicating specific time, utilizing personal product expertise, and finding a balance between personal and community commitments, individuals can effectively navigate these challenges. Ahead of now, I wish to give importance to reaching out to students, particularly from tier 2 and tier 3 cities’ colleges, who are increasingly active in attending events. Also to grow the product community in Coimbatore, focusing on expanding its reach and impact.
