 That's the last popcorn. Nope, there's still popcorting. The rest of the popcorn's getting burnt. That's what happens during the time of those. You guys are all burnt popcorn. These guys are the fresh popcorns. And then there's probably a lot of kernels somewhere that forgot that they were going to attend the talk. OK, do I have to, like, say something to start? Or, like, do I just start? It's your poor bit. OK, I don't have a clicker, right? OK. So hello, everyone. I am Karine Wallach. I lead the developer community at a company called StarTree. We build developer tools. It's kind of managed solutions around Apache Pino. If you're curious, you can look it up. It's pretty cool stuff. But today I'm here to talk to you about community stuff. So the topic, which you guys already know because you're here, is turning users into advocates and doing it at scale. So just starting off, just a little bit of background about me. I'm not going to dig too much into this. But basically, I kind of fell into doing community. I started organizing happy hours for me and my girlfriends because I realized that when we talk to each other, things happen. And then I ended up starting a women's networking group. I launched it in New York City. And I also launched one in Philadelphia. And I was running it for, it was free for everyone to come in and whatever was pretty cool. And all contributed from the community. And I was running that for 10 years. Still kind of exists, but it kind of fizzled out a little bit. And then after that, I used to work in rap music before I got into technology. I literally was doing marketing for M&M and 50 Cent. And then I found my way into tech. And when I did, my first official community role was my last job. I was working at Neo4j. It's a graph database company. Really, really, really freaking cool. Highly recommend to take a look at it if you are, if you like networks and connections and stuff, it's really, really cool. And it's a very relevant community. And then since then, about two years ago, I joined StarTree, which is a company I currently work at now. We're an early stage startup. Yeah, pretty early. I don't know, we're 70 people. So I guess it's not that early. And working on building the community around StarTree and Pino, we have the open source Apache Pino project that we are a very big supporter of. So I'm gonna kind of work a little bit backwards as I'm kind of presenting this story to you. And I'm gonna tell you stories and then just kind of give you the lessons that I've learned from it. But hopefully there'll be like some actual tactical takeaways that you can take from this presentation. Okay. So first, when I got to Neo4j, this was like my first time doing kind of like an official community development role. And there were some observations that I had. So one, the community there was really healthy. There was like a lot of really engaged people. And I was trying to understand like what caused it to be this like healthy engaged community. And I blame it on this guy. Michael Hunger, he was basically, he's been with Neo4j for like, I don't know, since it was born 10 years ago or something like that. But one thing that he was consistently doing, I mean, he was doing all kinds of developer advocacy work, answering questions, things like that. But he was always recognizing people for the small contributions that they made. And he was calling it out and thanking them. So it was just consistent. Wow, thank you so much. That was so great. Did you see how this person did this thing? Just consistent, privately and publicly. And I think that that is one of the largest reasons on why this community was so healthy. Like, nobody was ignored. People were noticed for all the things that they did. And that is huge. So, the three big things, this is, sorry. I'm like looking at my speaker notes. I could see it right in front of me. And I still choose to like, let me just wait. Okay, so the three big things, the gratitude, the recognition and inclusion. So he was always bringing people in. So like, whenever they were working on anything, he'd always say, well, we have to ask this person, include this person, include that person. Bringing everybody in to the conversation. And those are the things that I think were like really the big cause of like, what made this community so healthy to start off with. I got really lucky jumping into the healthy community. Very good experience. So, I'm gonna kind of just kind of go over like the community ecosystem. This is overall on how I look at community. First of all, when you're asking for any kind of contributions from your users, any kind of advocacy work or writing or whatever it might be, whenever you're thinking about what kind of contributions you want them to make, you wanna make sure that it's going to matter to the rest of the community. And that is really important. You have to create contribution requests that actually circle back. Now, the benefit of that and the reason why it's so important to do this is because you want to ultimately create some kind of feedback loop, right? Where like the rest of your community is grateful and recognizing the people for the contributions that they're making. So, let's see. This is the ecosystem that I found online, which I thought was kind of interesting, but so if you're doing something that's like community development where like your goal is like product feedback, for example, right? You wanna make sure that somebody on the product team actually cares about what these people are providing, right? So like this feedback loop, it's really, really important. So like if you're asking for like contributions that are blog posts, you wanna make sure that people are actually reading them or the content is actually relevant to the community. So I think this is like a really important point to note. Okay, so in the ecosystem, just going back to this picture really quick, there are different types of contributors. And if this is, I mean, I think all this stuff is kind of important to like be considerate of when you're doing community, you know, transitioning users to advocates. So the first one, I kinda chose these words randomly. They don't like, some of them I heard some other places and some of them I just made up so like they're kind of flexible and this is very high level. There's definitely more than these but I'm just kinda giving an example. The first one is your lurkers. It's not a bad thing, it sounds bad but those are the people who basically digest all the content. They read everything, they watch stuff, they may or may not comment, they may not say anything but they are actually absorbing the content. Then you have your commenters, people who comment and like and things like that. So that's like your very minimal types of contributions. I don't even know if I spelled that right but it doesn't matter. We're not here, this is not a spelling bee, okay? But people who give feedback and ask questions and those kinds of things, like people who are a little bit more engaged, that's this category of misspelled commenters. People who make comments, that's the category I gave it. And then the third one, and again, this is high level so there definitely could be more types of personas but this is just for the example of like how to do this kind of building. And then the third one is you have your, I don't know if this came up at the right time, but the champions, the people who are actually actively contributing, you're like highest contributing folks. Generally you know who those people are, they're very eager to like do stuff and be involved. So those are like your top level contributors. So it's, the one thing to like note is that you don't want to necessarily convert your lurkers to contributors and chances are it won't happen. So you don't have to think about it like how do I make everybody in my community contribute stuff? It won't happen, I mean it could, right? But like the chances are it doesn't have to happen that way. The way you kind of want to approach it is you want to minimize the barrier to entry. So like with every level of type of contribution you want to give them one step up further than what they're already doing, right? So like for example, your lurkers, most of the time they just read, they don't say anything, whatever, ask them to like like something or like ask a question or like something super bare minimal that you can get them to do some kind of thing. Questions and comments are great because then they can get feedback and that's like when you can pull them into a feedback loop that's also valuable. And you want to ask them for something very, very minimal. So like your, like people who comment or maybe like things and things like that, maybe ask them to give more specific feedback to the blogs that they're writing or they're reading or whatever, or even publicly sharing it. Like hey, if you like this blog post you should tweet about it and tell the author and this is kind of going back to that feedback loop, right? It's like you want to ultimately use your lurkers to feed into the people who are actually contributing to show them that they're making an impact. So it's this full cycle, right? Same thing with like product feedback, if you're trying to like get product feedback from your community, you want to make sure that it's a full circle in some way. So like whoever is receiving that product feedback, you want to make sure that that circles back and that person feels valuable. There's some other things that I'll get into shortly. But again, just slow little levels more and then more than what they're doing. Okay, so this is another minimizing the barriers entry. This is a story. So I do a lot of observations about like communities that I'm in and how I engage with things and what I do and I pull a lot of these understandings and realizations based off of that. And this is some examples. I don't, any of you guys like do Google reviews like review restaurants and stuff like that. Okay, so you're probably familiar with this. You get a notification. I don't know if you guys can see this, but like you get a notification on your phone. It's like, hey, how was Stubbs Barbecue that was last night? If you went to that time before. This slide was built last night. How was Stubbs Barbecue? Now in this message from Google to me, they're telling me that I'm important. I'm ranked, oh, okay, that's not, I can't talk to you right now. I'm glad people are calling, you know, makes me feel special. Okay, so they put me in the top 10 of Bar Reviewers, right? So they're like, you're important. Your feedback matters. Like we care, like you're, people care. You're top 10. I don't know how they rate that, but it doesn't matter. And then they also told me that this bar, it says the best photos here get over 6,700 views. So they're telling me that I'm important and my feedback matters. Like I'm in the top of the top of contributors and that this contribution is important to the rest of the community, right? So I'm like, all right, this contribution's important. It's my responsibility to give this contribution to people who actually need it. And then once I do one, I just rate it five stars, right? Then they ask me for a little bit more. They didn't ask me to write a full review and answer all these questions and all this kind of stuff. They just asked me for five star review. I could stop there if I wanted, but they wrote thanks for the tip. So they gratitude, right? So they thanked me. And then they also put write review so like I can add a little bit more. So they gave me a little bit of gratitude and then they gave me the option to take one more step further, right? So it's like inching up the stairs. Then they sent me this. Again, I'm still ranked 10% of, I'm sure you guys all are, right? Aren't we all rated top 10%? You've made one review in your entire life and you're top 10%. So I've ranked top 10% of restaurant reviewers now too. Now in this one, in the second request that they're asking for me, they're asking me to answer quick questions. So it's one step further from like the five star review. Can you answer a couple of questions, right? So they first got me doing this and they're like, oh, thank you so much. You're so important. Then like, you're still so important. And can you do a little bit more than what you did last time? And then they made me feel like I'm going up. To where I have no idea, right? But like, I'm getting points to do something. Doesn't matter. And they're like, they're making this into a game. They're like, you're going up and you're higher than you were. You're already 10%, top 10% of contributors and you can do more and more. And then of course in here, they're still saying to me, do you wanna contribute more? You can do just five stars and then contribute more and make a whole activity of it. So I was like, all right, why don't we do that? And then they give me this entire form to fill out with like adding photos. I gotta tell them if it's hand to cap accessible. I don't know if it's a place. I mean, I probably do, but like, you know, like how much it costs, all this kind of stuff, right? So like if they would have given this to me ahead of time, I might have skipped it. But they gave me very small, you know, you're the best, just give us five stars. And they slowly inch you into like becoming a major contributor. And then at that point, that's when you can take it to another level where you like kind of bring them in as a little bit more of like a high level contributor, right? So like basically what they're doing is they're, first they're showing you what your potential impact is. So they're saying to you, you have the ability to make a big difference in this community. This is a requested thing. People want it and you're important. So the impact is great. So they're already showing me that. Then they're thanking me. There's a lot of gratitude in there. Thank you, thank you for, you know, giving feedback to the community, for making an impact, whatever. And then they show me what my actual impact is, right? Like they'll sometimes show you like, your photo has been viewed 12,000 times. You're like, no one has it. But like, it doesn't matter. Nobody's here to challenge what Google says as facts. But this feedback loop is really important. They're showing me that like what I've actually contributed in the past is valuable. And they're also leveling me up. So I feel like something, I'm growing. I don't know what it is, but there's more points coming in there and I'm growing. And then they also highlight to me the next bigger step of contribution little by little. I can't believe I already did 360 reviews for things. That's crazy. Okay, so motivations for contributions. So this is very similar to like the last slide, but I think it's just kind of over highlighting and of like these are really, really important. Foundationally, you have to have these things in your community if you want people to contribute. Gratitude. And this is thank yous. It's not just from you, but from other community members, privately, publicly, thank yous. Like that has to just be thank you, thank you, thank you. You could even someone ask the question, wow, thank you so much for asking this question. Obviously everybody has to do more work now that you asked the question, but like thank you, you know. Recognition, same thing, privately and publicly. Like you want to recognize people for what they've done. Big and small. Thank you so much for rating this thing or giving the comment or feedback to the speaker. They really, you know, this kind of feedback loop. Inclusion. If you are working on something that could be relevant to another person, include them. So like right now, for example, we're working on like our first official meetup in India in Bangalore and we created a Slack channel and we invited everybody from Bangalore. We're like all the people, and they're not helping us, some of them are helping us organize it, but they're just people on the ground that we know, but we're trying to include all of them, right? So like this inclusion is really, really important. The feelings of leveling up, they should feel like they're on a different, higher contributor level than other people. And then I know there's some controversy around this. People are like oh, oh wait no, this is the same one. Yeah, feelings of impact. I guess my notes are different. Feelings of impact and usefulness and value really important. People have to feel like they are valuable and what they're contributing actually matters to people and this is why the ecosystem is so important. That what you're asking of them is actually going to be utilized and digested and fed back into the loop. This is the one that I was saying is kind of controversial. A lot of people are like oh, swag doesn't mean anything. That's true to some degree. If you're giving just swag away at conferences and stuff, it could be great for whatever, but it's not something that people actually value, but when people earn swag, that's when they value it. Which I'm gonna dig in a little bit more into this because I actually like this earn swag kind of thing. So earn swag programming. So I'm gonna give you guys a story, another story. So I am a plasma donor for American Red Cross. It is not easy to donate plasma because you have to sit there for two hours and they pull your blood, they literally take it out and they put it back in the same arm. It's not pleasant, but I'm AB positive blood type so that's kind of what I have to do. But American Red Cross is brilliant with their contribution strategy. Aside from calling you a million times, let's put that aside, which also kind of helps because you're like, all right, I feel bad, people need it. But that's the thing, people need it. I'm like, impact, that's true though, people are dying. So you guys should all donate blood, by the way. Find out your blood type and figure out what you actually need to donate because if you're AB positive, do not donate regular blood, donate plasma. Okay, so earn swag programming. So here's the story of what American Red Cross did to me. Hey, Kareen, you can earn one of these awesome gifts by donating regularly in 2020. This is an annual thing program that they have going on. This is the entire year I can earn something, okay? If I donate four to five times, which is quite a lot, it's every other month to take plasma out of your body and put that blood back in, I get this cooler, okay? If I donate six to seven times, I get a $15 gift card which seems really cheap to me, but it doesn't matter. I'm like, my life is on the line here. And then if I do eight plus donations, I get this American Red Cross jacket that I will never wear because I dress like this and this does not match my outfit. But when I got this email, I was like, I need this jacket. I was like, I, and I got the jacket, by the way. I don't wear it. I've never worn it once, but I did get the jacket. But I was like, I need this jacket. So you have this kind of annual program where you can ask people where they can kind of contribute on a regular basis and earn something. Like they actually contributed, where they made an impact and they can earn something. But that's not all they do. Then every once in a while, they'll spark it up with a here's an exclusive type of swag thing that's only available for two to three weeks. And this one, it's like a game day thing. I don't know, maybe it was like around some something, something around in September or whatever kind of game that is baseball. I guess that looks like a baseball shirt. So like they'll have like these random exclusive things that are either like, they could either be holidays or around some kind of event or launch. Like maybe you have like a launch for a new product that you're building and you want some feedback on it or whatever it might be. But it's like an exclusive giveaway that's just for this limited amount of time that people can earn it. So you have to kind of like combine these different models of how people can earn swag. And if you have questions about swag platforms and stuff, I've used all kinds. You feel free to contact me. I like put my cards on the table afterwards if anyone has questions. Okay. So there's no title to this slide, but that's okay. I don't even know what the title is. So tell you guys another story. Oh, I do know what the title is. This is about making them feel like they're part of a bigger picture thing, right? So it's not just this little thing, it's something much, much larger. So when I was at Neo4j, we, so it was the guy, graphs databases or like the graphs science like graph theory and stuff was created by this guy in like the 1700s or something. His name is Leonard Euler. His birthday is April 15th. So I decided to make a celebration where we made an unofficial holiday just for our community called Global Graph Celebration Day. And what I did was is I blasted out to all our community members saying on this day, all our community all over the world is gonna organize their own events. We're not doing it, right? This is very little legwork for us. But you guys can all organize your own events on this day. This is kind of like this exclusive one-off kind of thing. It's a holiday thing, right? And we will supply you with those cool shirts. We'll give you, we have this whole funnel thing of like you can, we'll set you with a unique RSVP link to your event and if your people register through there. I can give you guys, if you're interested in like the real details, I can tell you how we operated this, but we ended up having 60 events in six continents with like thousands and thousands of people. And the cool thing is, is that all these community members, they basically did the advocacy for us. It was all these new people who were organizing events and speaking all over the world. We did send them this little video that they could play and all this other kind of stuff, but like it made it feel, it was actually kind of wild. This is a crazy blog post. If you look at, you could probably Google it. It's a crazy blog post. Like literally we handed out these t-shirts and like everybody's wearing these shirts. Somebody made a birthday cake with a graph theory birthday cake and people were like, everyone was wearing the shirts. It was like, it was wild. And everyone tweeted about it too. That was part of the responsibility, right? You tweet your picture and you hold up a sign that says hello world in your language. It was really, really cool. Another one that we did is a graph visualization. So like graph databases, it's very backend, but there is some really nice beautiful visualizations on it and it helps people understand what graph databases are when you see the visualization. So for Valentine's Day, I did like V-Day and like instead of V-Day, it was Visualization Day and everybody tweeted a picture of their visualization of their graph or their data model and then if they tweeted about it, they get a cool exclusive Valentine's Day t-shirt with like literally the heart. Neo4j is my data bay, we took that. Which I found out bay means poop in some languages but it doesn't matter. So that's, there's the headline. I think I accidentally added animation on it. So you got to make users feel like they're part of something bigger. Oh, there's like one of the graph Celebration Day t-shirt thing. Okay, so feelings of tribalism. So I saw this really cool talk at the CMX conference a couple years ago and I don't know why, just a lot of the things that this woman said really stuck with me. This is the name of the talk. Jessica Wao, I think her name is. If I'm pronouncing it right. I mean, her dad's her name, but I don't know if I'm pronouncing it right. Jessica, I'm probably pronouncing it right. And she had a talk of like how communities relate to indigenous tribes and I thought this was just really, really cool. And I'm just gonna give you the high level points. I highly recommend watching it just because she like kind of digs deeper into like everything. But, okay, so first is like a sense of oneness. So this is where she talks about like colors and language, making people feel like they belong. Even like initiations, that kind of stuff is like it has this feeling of tribalism, but it can create a feeling of belonging. Kinship is having feelings that are like family-like. So you can create like nicknames for family, like maybe brother in like some different languages, or like some kind of nicknames of what you call all the people in your community that has this feeling of family. Then you have language, and this is common languages, right? It's like it could be just like a greeting that everybody uses across the board. I don't know, for like a neo, for some reason it was like cheers and cheers. Everybody was like cheers. I don't know why, because I feel like that matches more Apache Pinot since it's like named after wine. Also, clear roles. This is actually something that's really interesting to people have responsibilities. So like in tribes, you know, you have hunter, gatherers, and nurturers. Leadership, she said you don't need a dictator, but you do need leaders, and like or some kind of ranking, which also helps for the contribution element obviously, but you should have some kind of ranking. And those people should be like, actually like the guy Michael Hunger, who I showed earlier. He was very good at like leading by example. Like he was definitely a leader of the community. That was awesome. Common Beliefs is another one. Rights and rituals. So like kind of like the Global Graph Celebration Day, they still celebrate it now. I mean, they don't do it as cool as I did when I was there, but they still celebrate Global Graph Celebration Day with the community. So like it has this like element of like tradition, you know, and also laugh and play. So like bring lightness to it, make it enjoyable. You can do like collective things together. So like even if your community is a little bit more serious, you can always start off with something lighter to like have fun together. But I think this talk is great. I highly recommend it. Okay, finding the small contributors. This is a lot of this stuff is actually like, it's very nuanced, it kind of depends, right? But like a lot of it's probably very hands-on when you start off. And then you could try to kind of figure out how to scale it out based on what works. So like something is, this is an example of someone, something, you know, like this guy works target and you know, he just introduced himself in the chat. And I was like, oh, we'd love to hear more about this use case, right? That's like kind of probably a bad example. I'll give you another example. So we had somebody in this, I was looking for the Slack messages, but I couldn't find it because it's like it was a couple of months ago. We had this guy, Diageo, he answered someone's question. They went into our Slack and they say, hey, what's the difference between Pino and like Clickhouse or whatever? And he was like, oh, we assessed this and we found that Pino is more performant and blah, blah, blah. And here are the comparisons and this is what we found. And he like, you know, just a little blurb of, but he already contributed a little bit to the point where like, he's answering somebody's question, right? So like we already got him that far. So I messaged him privately and I was like, you know, a lot of people ask about this topic. I'm telling him, it is impactful. The community cares. If you wanna share your thoughts and write a blog post, you know, we'd be happy to share it with the community and whatever. And I'm like, let me know if you need help. And he's like, oh, maybe I'll think about it. You know, whatever. And like, he's like, and I was like, let me know if you need any help. Happy to talk to you through it, blah, blah. A couple months later, he just published a blog post and had the comparison of all the different technologies that they, it was amazing. And he didn't even ask me for help. He was just like, I wrote this. I was like, okay, great. But it got a lot of attention and I think it's gonna be one of those like very long-lived blog posts which is really cool. So, but initially you've gotta start off really small and then you can kind of try to figure out how to automate it. I can't tell you exactly how to do it because every situation is different. But, but it can really make a big difference when you do it on like a large scale. Okay. These are the takeaways. I think I probably included most of it. You guys can take a picture if you want to. I don't know. There's also gonna be slides shared afterwards too. But yeah, like when you're building your community, you always wanna think about gratitude and recognition and make sure across the board, anybody who's interacting with your community knows that. Also inclusion, don't leave people out. It's really, really important to include them. Feelings of leveling up, where are they going? What does it mean? Like how can you make them feel like they're more important than they are? What is that? Is that five minutes? Is it 10 minutes? Okay. Not bad. I actually was not sure how long this was. And then again, the community ecosystem, the contributions to feed into the cycle. And you wanna do your best to keep the cycle moving in all directions with the things that you ask. So like, again, like if you have people who are commenting or liking like those lurkers, ideal world is you get them to like actually give a little bit of feedback. And if they give a little bit of feedback and then your person who did a meetup, you know, it's posted online somewhere and then it gets a bunch of likes or a bunch of thumbs up, you can give that feedback to them and be like, wow, okay, a thousand people watched your video and you know, it has 125 likes. So like this kind of stuff means a lot and it does motivate people to do more. So, and it's also the same thing. It's like if you were trying to get product feedback, you're like, oh, the team would really love this idea and we're thinking about doing this, include them in the conversation. Like maybe someone wants to talk to them and dip pick their brain. People actually love that. Like as busy as they are, they want to feel like they're important and valued and their thoughts matter, right? And then creating a ladder of easy contributions. So like, I can kind of tell you guys about like a program that we're gonna get ready to put together. It's basically like a powered by Apache Pino page where people can do a little blurb about what they've contributed and then little blurb, very small, one paragraph, right? Not that hard to like share your use case there but then you take this content and this person's little contribution and then you feed it into a funnel that then goes into more and more larger types of contributions, right? Maybe people vote on the topic or if there's people who are like to point out that use case, you tell them like this is a use case that I think a lot of people would find valuable and that's how you feed into it. And my marketing person told me to put the slide in there so I'm doing it. We're working on a real time analytics conference since San Francisco in August. It is, if you're interested in real time analytics, it is free to join virtually. Well, it's not a virtual, it's on demand afterwards but it's free if you want to do that and then if you want to come, you can come and party with us and all the real time analytics people. And that's it. That's the topic. My timing was like spot on. Does anybody have any questions? I also live my business card, so like if you want, and then I'm also on the Slack so like if you go to dev.startree.ai and you join our Pino Slack, you could find me in there. Probably takes me like a day to respond, but yes. In terms of conversation, like, that's okay. I think that, so she's saying that her community is quite silent so she's like how can we get them to like do more? Like there was like 15 contributors, I guess, that are like actively contributing. Are those 15 contributors people who work for you? Yeah. So sometimes it could take a little bit, so I don't know your community exactly and I'm happy to like talk to you in deeper detail about this afterwards. But so first of all, I think that it's, you have to kind of come up with something like very, very small, right? So like introductions, for example. And this happened with us too. We created an introductions channel because we realized that it wasn't working well in like the general channel. And we have like a greet bot that's like, please introduce yourself and nobody ever does. And then we hired a new community manager who's like working on my team. She started, her name is Yardan Roka. She's amazing. I have to shout her out, obviously. She's like really, really amazing. But she sends people direct messages and be like, hey, I didn't see your introduction. Like, you should introduce yourself in the channel. And it works. And people start introducing themselves. So like, I know, it's like you wouldn't be like, wait a minute. But I think sometimes like there's a little bit more hands-on touch. And the reason why I was asking if you're 15 people work for your organization is because potentially you can give them some of those duties to like greet people or maybe there's like a connector in there that's like, if somebody asks a question about something, they can like make an introduction if someone is doing something similar or something like that. But like you can ask a little bit more of contributions from them too. There probably is like little things you can do. But again, it's like you have to start off so small. Like can't ask people for like big contributions and maybe nudge them a little bit. But if you want, I'm like, I'm happy to like sit for a little while and like really dig in deeper. Cause I learned when I'm like consulting with people about community stuff, I learned myself. I'm like, oh, that's interesting, you know, collaboration of minds. So I'm happy to like talk with you. I'll leave my cards on the table. Does anybody else have any questions? Yeah, that's an interesting question. She asked if like, if you ever have to like kind of work backwards, like somebody was heavily contributing and then they're a lurker. I feel like that does happen pretty frequently actually, like, you know, especially like when your community gets bigger, there's always people who kind of move back. It also could be like that they stopped working with a certain technology. So then all of a sudden it just like, they're off. If there's things like they stopped working with the technology, it's kind of hard to get them to continuously advocate for something that they're just not working with or if they're not passionate about it. But I don't know, I feel like it would probably be, I think it might be like kind of that same hands-on touch a little bit, but just letting them know that you've noticed that they haven't really been around and like asking them maybe something very specific, be like, hey, you know, I saw this blog post, I wanted to get your thoughts on it or something like that, maybe something that they've already done in the past that you know that they are more likely to do because there's people who like do certain things and different kinds of contributions. Like people were like, we have a guy who's helping us organize the meetup in Bangalore and I was like, do you wanna host it? Just be like introducing people and he's like, I don't do that. I was like, okay. So he doesn't do that. So I'm never gonna ask him to host something. But he likes speaking at it, which is really weird, but yeah, maybe a little bit more of that hands-on touch for like the ones that fall out. You know, there's like a lot of platforms now for like community monitoring to see what people are falling out. But some of it's honestly like trial and error. You kinda gotta like see what works and then just keep trying that repeat thing and then sharpening it as you go. I don't know if you use any of those like monitoring platforms, but that might be helpful to kind of see if those engagements work. Virtual question. Whatever. You guys are gonna give, you guys are so nice giving the virtual attendees the question. Okay, let's hear what the virtual question is. Oh, that's interesting. So they asked about how to replicate this when you're doing it in-house, inside of your organization. I think a lot of it's the same thing. Like, you know, you're making them feel like it's like you have to tell them, like this is something big and we need everybody's contributions. A lot of times when I have tried to make our internal employees do something that they're not doing, I schedule a working meeting, but then they are forced to be there. But I would say it probably is pretty similar because a lot of times like when, like these are like very intrinsic motivations, right? Like why do we do the things that we do in general? It's like we love it. You know, like those are the things that you are the best at, are the things that you're good at. So I guess it was probably pretty similar. Maybe there could be some maybe clearer roles on like what people can do internally, but asking them what they wanna do. But there's like, you know, there's always people who like just do stuff internally, like we have this guy who works with us, his name is Mitch, and like I saw his post in like a confluent, we work very closely with confluent, in the confluence talk about our event. He just posted it there without telling anyone or saying anything. So I just made sure that I shouted him out. And like now I'm constantly pulling him in for things. So it's actually like a pretty similar process. I was really impressed when I saw that. I was like, oh, that's great. And then you know, you have the people who are always answering questions on Slack. And it's the same thing. You have to like call them out and recognize them. In like the company meetings, there's gonna be a meeting that talks about people retweeting things, just so you know, telling you ahead of time. People internally at the company, where we're calling out, these are the people who tweet the most and retweet and like and when, you know, and share and all this other kind of stuff internally. So I think it's kind of a similar feedback loop. Okay. Okay. Yeah. So you mean like when you're like, yeah. I mean, you can make light of it and be like, yo, you're so awesome that everyone's jumping on it, you know? Like you can make light of it. It's like, a lot of it's like, you kind of just have to have fun with people. You know, like, what's it gonna hurt if two people are like, wow, that was awesome? Did you see this thing? Like, it's not gonna be bad. You know, like, I think it could be, actually I think it's kind of nice that you have, you don't have to worry that people aren't recognizing. When you have an excessive amount of recognition and gratitude, yeah. Yeah, I mean, if it's like a work structure thing, I think you can, I mean, I don't know how you would break it up, but I think you could do something that could break up the type of recognition that people are responsible for recognizing this person in some kind of way or creating a process behind it, you know? So maybe when you're recognizing somebody, that's also like a chance to get them to do another thing, you know? So like, what would be the process behind it? But usually I think it's like helpful if the person who does the recognition is also the person who asks them to do more. You know, like that initial engager is like, it's usually good if they have. Like, Yarden, for example, like she's been going in and be like, you should introduce yourself. And like, if you were to ask any of those people to like write a blog post, I would send her back to do that same thing rather than like sending somebody else. So, you know, I think that when you do kind of figure out how you're gonna break it up, make sure it's still streamlined and the communications should still feel like warm, I guess. Yeah, this guy had a question. Yeah, you, go ahead. I mean, I had a lot of failed things too. Like, you know, it wasn't just like, I mean, I showed you like the cruel ones, you know? Like, and so for me, I usually just drive everything with empathy. I'm like, what makes me want to do something? Like, what makes me want to speak at this conference? And what makes me want to speak at it again? Like, what is it that's giving me? You know, like, they give you like a speaker thing at the front and you get this special tag. Like, one of the things I was thinking about with the tags just like, I was like, this isn't noticeable enough that I'm a speaker. That's something that I noticed that I was like, that's how I drive the empathy of my programs. But I've had a lot of failed things too. Like, I did a, you know, we were trying to get people to answer questions on our Slack when I was at Neo4j. Like, we're trying to get our community to answer more questions. So we created this like ninja program where there was like a leaderboard and like when they were answering questions, it would tally up their questions and how much they'd answered during the week. And if they had this thing, they would get this hoodie and roll out, whatever. And like it impacted a little bit, but like we had like three contributors. Like it wasn't like largely impactful. I mean, I guess to some degree, it all depends on what you think is success. Three people answering questions is good. But you know, it's always, it's like a trial and error thing. And every community is kind of different. But everything that I do, I drive through empathy. I'm like, how would I feel? And like I try to be honest with myself. Like that's like, like I don't want to tell you that like I'm upset that this doesn't show that I'm a bigger speaker than I am. You know what I mean? But like, but you know, it's like part of the honesty thing. Like you have to like, the badge has to be different. It has to be that plus three points that what Google gave me, you know, where it's like you're leveled up. You get, maybe it's a cool speaker pin. I don't know, you know. Okay, I'm glad that I'm glad that it's helpful. It's like, yeah. Okay, so he asked like if you were to start a community today, what tools would you use? I think it depends on what your goals are and how you want people to contribute. So like, for example, I mean like you have the Apple support community, those are like forums and it's probably structured pretty well because it's optimized for Google searches and then also for likes and things like that because if you're a person who posted a question and somebody answered and you have 150 pluses, it makes you feel really good, right? So this forum style works well. For our community, personally, I think Slack is amazing because it is very instant and it's very warm. But I think it all depends on what it is that you're actually trying to accomplish with your community. Like, I don't think Apple support community is really like a community, but it kind of is because it's an ecosystem, right? You're getting people to contribute things that are essentially feeding back into the loop and making sure that this is the best answer. You know, so like, I think it depends on what you're doing. I'm happy to like talk about it if it's something that you're like, you know, thinking about. Yes, thank you. You mean me? Not my team, just kidding. No, no, just kidding, I was just kidding. I did work with my team to do it. So this is like part where you like kind of make it scalable, right? So like the first time we did Global Graph Celebration Day, there was like a lot of things that we wanted to keep on our own. So like RSVP lists, for example, like we didn't contact anybody. So we told them, we're like, we're not gonna contact them, but we need to get the sizes and all this other stuff. But like, I created a forum where they could register their event. And then once they registered it, we publish it online recognition for like, here are the organizers of this thing. And we published it. And then we gave them this URL that was a custom URL. And then everything else was just automated emails. Be like, hey, we're doing this, here's the video, we're gonna send this shipment out, make sure you, you know, your address is right and whatever, but it was like, I created a process. So like, it was a little bit more automated. And actually worked out. And the same thing with the V-Day thing, it was like pretty simple. I'm like, you know, if you tweet, send us like submit the tweet with your visualization, we'll add it to the blog, which we have like a list like you could go through all the blog and see all the cool visualizations. So like it made it feel like it's part of something bigger, but it was just like a form submission. It's like, you did it, put it in the form, your name, email, whatever, and we'll contact you with like, right now we're using for like a swag thing. We just set it up. We didn't even like announce it yet officially. A store where like we can send people points to be able to earn their swag. And that's really nice because then you don't have to get addresses. You could just literally assign it to their email and then they could just go get it themselves. Really huge difference rather than being like, what's your size and what shirt do you want, you know. So hopefully that answers the question. I feel like I ramble sometimes, you know. It's called Cover, that's C-O-V-V-E-R. It's actually really cool. They like set up your whole storefront and they're print on demand so you don't have to like warehouse anything and they have routing. So like if you, somebody purchased it in India, they'll print it in India. So that's pretty, it's pretty cool. It is horrible, yeah. So I use them for like, we're gonna be using them for like a lot of reward programs like I was telling you like the powered by Pino page. Like if someone does a little blurb and submits their little tiny use case, then we'll give them points to the store and they could pick whatever they want. But then if they write a blog about it, you know that's the email that they're gonna get afterwards, right. We're like, thank you so much for your little contribution. If you wanna make this into a blog, you can get this hoodie. So I use it, we're gonna be using it for those kinds of things. Anything that we do that's like bulk shipment, like I won't get it from like Rush Order T's or Kodas. I use, I mean, a lot of people are familiar with Kodas. They're pretty popular. Noah's my guy there. I use like for kits and gifts and stuff like that. So like we just did like for our champions, we sent them hoodies like Marine Layer. We couldn't do that through cover. It's also like, it's a brand that is not distributed all over the world. So they can't really do it with the routing thing. But the Marine Layer hoodies I got through Kodas. Like they're very like high quality embroidered stuff. Rush Order T's they do for like bundles of stuff. So like when I did the Global Graph Celebration Day and had to ship out 60 shipments of boxes of t-shirts, I did that through Rush Order T's. So they just like shipped them out in bundles for me too. So, any other questions? No, okay. I'll give you guys my business card. Like leave it on the table if anybody wants to grab it or like schedule a coffee or virtual coffee and we could talk about community stuff. I'm always happy to talk about it because I actually learned when I talked to people about their programming and what they're doing and what works and what doesn't. But thank you guys for coming. I also want to say my business cards are actually stickers, so they have a value. They're not totally useless. Thank you.