 That's where it is all the way up to the top. It's pretty much almost in Canada, and sometimes when I go hiking, I feel like I'm in the world because it thinks I'm in Canada, so that's how close they are to the board. And I am a community organizer. I have been organizing communities for about five years, and the vast majority of this work was not paid, so I organized quite a few conferences, like New York's Burlington, Burlington Ruby, and Offline Camp, as well as I founded my local chapter of Groke Velvet, which is a nonprofit that teaches women how to code, and we're celebrating four years this year. I realized I wasn't looking at my speaker heads, so I'm going to go back to slides real quick because I wanted to also talk about who this talk is for. So this talk is really for people who work at companies that need to hire developers in case to your company about why you should have more opportunity to support your community, also for people who attend tech events, which is almost in this room, but you aren't sure how or why to help organize community, people who organize tech community stuff and want to better articulate what kinds of things you need and what kinds of things you can't get help with, but you're not so sure how to ask. So back to building communities and organizing communities. This work really didn't come easily. I've been doing it for five years, I've been involved in a lot of different projects, and when you're organizing communities there's a lot of back and forth, you have a lot of volunteers and people who really have, they're very well-meaning, but they're not offering help that is super helpful. They want to meet you for coffee and then they ask you a bunch of questions and then you don't hear from them for three or four or five months or ever. And so you wasted a bunch of time talking to them, and they didn't really have your best interest in heart. And so, you know, Girl Development is a good example of this for me. So we're celebrating four years, it wouldn't be possible to do this work if we didn't have amazing supporters in our community, companies that provide space for us to hold our classes, volunteers who come to TA for us, people to teach our classes, I have a co-leader who joined me a few years ago, I have a team of volunteers that help organize. So without all of this support, you know, Girl Development wouldn't have lasted four years, we wouldn't have grown to over a thousand members, and then we're part of a network of 54 contractors across the country and 70 members, 70,000 members in that network. So all of this wouldn't be possible about just one person saying, hey, can I do this work for an hour? You know, once a month or something. So now, I work for IBM, I'm a developer advocate for the Watson data platform, and for the first time I'm actually getting paid to organize community, and so now I'm on the other side of the fence. I get to support community organizers, but I also work with people who support community organizers, and I want to help people understand how they can do this better and more effectively and do it in a way that makes it easier for communities to run and function in the last long time if everyone's happy and learn lots of awesome stuff. So in thinking about doing this, I've also, in my job, I got involved with the Offline First community. If you haven't heard about Offline First, is a method to software development where you handle first the issue of, you know, how your users interact with your app when they're offline. So you can do that with local databases and things like that, but there's a really budding, great budding community around this technology and they're really at the infant stages. So now I'm starting over with a new community that needs to grow from the ground up. Elixir is maybe similar to that. I think you're still growing. There's still a lot of evangelizing that needs to happen to whole people in this community. So maybe this will be true for you. So in my experience building communities, not getting paid, now that I'm getting paid and I'm helping to organize a community that's international, I wanted to know how much of my experience is universal. So I've posed a question to Twitter. I said, you know, do you help organize community in tech? I'd like to talk to you and see what your experience is like. And I was really looking for people who had amazing supporters and made their work more easier and more fulfilling. And I've heard from people all around the world. I've heard from North Carolina, Washington D.C., Philadelphia, California, also Berlin, UK, around Europe. And I was surprised, well I'm not even now that surprised, to hear that they all really share a lot of the same frustrations. So my real, like if you take one goal away from this talk, my goal is to say, you can't effectively support a tech community until you understand who they are and who they serve. And that way you can really benefit, you can find ways to benefit the community and then also find a way that you can also get mutual benefit from that relationship. So I want to help you understand some different tactics around that. So let's define a little bit about the communities that we're talking about. Some of these groups might be tied directly to a company. A company might own this community and fund it and they have sort of personal interests in being part of it. It could also be run by a nonprofit or volunteers. It could be run by people who are paid to organize community, but the community isn't necessarily attached to their company. It's just kind of an advantageous group in some way. And some communities are tied to the advance it in a specific programming language like Wixar or a development method. Others are committed to the advancement of diversity and tech or something like that. So in all my conversations, five major themes arose. Listen, learn, and be straight up. Make it easy to request support. Be prepared to offer more than just cash. Think long term. And encourage your employees to participate. So we'll go through each one. Christine Schneider of DAT Project, CSS Company U, Upfront UG, and CSS Classes CEM. Start a dialogue. Understand the community and be transparent about why your company wants to support it. So there are a lot of really great reasons to get involved with supporting your community as a company. You're creating a valuable improvement pipeline and marketing existence and the culture of your company. And you're fostering avenues for continued learning and improvement of your workers. So people at your company are more likely to get involved with the community if you're getting involved with it too. And encouraging them to go. And you're also letting the folks in your city know that you care about to do the system of tech outside of your walls. And so you have to bear in mind that not all the ways of supporting community are really going to help the mission of that community. So you have to kind of have a conversation and see what they really need. Another good example of this is real development because our local chapters are run by volunteers. And so our communities wouldn't be possible if we didn't have a really strong support network to make it possible. So I talked to Sylvia Helcourt of GDI Raleigh and she has the support they're at the local company called Sink Fusion and she said they're helpful to us on our community first and sell themselves second. The recruiting and sales pitches are there but respectful and appropriate. So if you're a helpful partner that makes community really easy for someone who's doing something awesome in tech they will happily sing the praises of your company and you don't have to really do anything because you're just making their jobs easier. So let's talk a little bit about a guide to see what you need to know to identify a community to support and find out what their needs are. So when you identify a community and you're really interested in learning more you should sit down with the organizer and ask them some basic questions. Find out about their community. What's the demographic of the people you intend what's the socioeconomic status where they can travel in from to come to your events how many people attend your events what is the group's core mission or most pressing goal and what are you trying to achieve with the work that you're doing in this community? Maybe what three concrete things does your group need the most right now to be able to achieve these goals and why are you doing this work? I think a lot of times when we go to community events we just assume that the person is doing it because they have just the kindest heart and they care so much but they might have some personal reasons too maybe they want to advance in their career maybe they want to demonstrate more leadership skills maybe it's for the benefit of their company for some reason and so it's important for you to know that and those are good reasons to do community but they're different they're sort of different in what people need. So awesome you had a great conversation you learned a ton you were super jazzed about a person who's leading this community you have a lot of confidence that this is going to last a long time and you want to jump in and make it better but you should hold up a little bit because some communities are not really the place you might want to be and you should ask a few more questions before you jump into that and really with a tech company with some skin in the game you probably want to know if this is a toxic community for some reason anyway are they creating an inclusive space are people from marginalized groups may feel welcome in this community and conversely you don't want to make the folk paw of supporting a community that turns around and you know bites you in the butt a little bit so and what does a toxic community look like so when you're looking at communities a toxic community might be a community that you look around and go to an event and all you see is you know white males there aren't any women speaking there haven't been any people of color who spoke in the past year or two and that could be because they have a small network and they haven't found a way to reach out yet it might be because these people are avoiding this community for very good reasons you probably want to know that before you throw any money or time or effort into that a good example of this is LambdaConf last year they hired a keynote speaker who had ties to white supremacy and the community went into an uproar because of this and so activists from all around the country and around the world emailed LambdaConf and emailed the companies who were supporting them begging them to pull out and within a few days LambdaConf lost all the one of their sponsors for the conference now I'm not listing the names of the companies that pulled out from the support you know you don't want to be the one receiving any of those emails you know an onslaught of people who are angry that you are putting a tie in your name to this kind of stuff so there are some really good questions you can ask to qualify and sort of get a feel for whether there might be some troubling things you need to know about first you can ask do you have a good product an adversity statement do you have a policy against teachers organizers speakers presenters using sexualized images or activities or other material at your events what strategies are you employing to ensure that your community promotes inclusion and diversity and have a little bit of conversation about that because if they struggle with it there may be some opportunity for them to approve or maybe their answers sound a little bit suspect and you realize they don't actually care that much what percentage of your speakers at 12 months have represented a diverse group and is there alcohol in it by your community events and if so do you have an alcohol policy do you make sure that there are non-alcohol beverages available do you offer options so that not all of your events are centered around alcohol so these are all really good questions by this point you probably have a good feel that you want to support they're doing a good job they really care about their community and they want it to be inclusive now you should make it really easy for them to support when they need it Tasha Scott of dotnet and c and codecant in New York said if your company sells tech services you should be sponsoring tech community events attendees of tech community events are more likely to be dedicated to their craft and have more well-rounded insights on how to solve problems for your company since they've seen how others solve problems but sponsoring tech events also gives companies the potential to be candidates face to face in a more natural way so they're a bunch of really great companies out there who do this really well github has an online portal where you can go and they really outline very clearly what they offer and what kinds of support they're able to give they collect all your information and they let you know if you got sponsorship some of their great companies out there Haroku, Adobe MailChimp all do this as well one benefit of this is that not only are you able to really state explicitly what kind of support your company at the end of the year is to see exactly how much impact you had how many developers were at the events that you supported how many events in total what was the money that was spent and what was the return and so you're able to really track that over time and that was great and marketing and you're recruiting numbers so outside of just money there's a lot of things that are really important to community organizers especially the volunteers if you're a volunteer getting a bunch of money probably feels great but it's a bunch of accounting it's a lot of tracking it's a lot of extra work and sometimes people just don't have the capacity to deal with it so being prepared to do more than just throw my hand event is key to a lot of the success in the community so if you continue some ideas and want to offer snacks snacks are always great everybody loves snacks but there's lots of other things you could offer space for workshops or meetups which includes setting up tables and chairs access to a projector access to wifi you could donate name tags to the group or power strips help pay for stickers or buttons or offer water laptops if your company has similar laptops that you're throwing away you can check with your local Robelka chapter or some other nonprofit that needs this kind of stuff for their members to work for it or in depth ways that you can get involved so you could be the one to coordinate the logistical stuff for the menu so if you're offering space set it all up for them have someone at the door to let people in and direct that way the person organizing the event doesn't have to worry about all that stuff it's really kind of emotional labor and all they have to do is worry about the content you could also donate swag from your company so if your company makes t-shirts or stickers or you know water bottles whatever they get to give it out for free the members are happy because they get free stuff and you're happy because your name is walking all over town now Big Home Rogers who is the core community organizer at the Node.js Foundation creator of Node.conf and co-host of RSC podcast said this after offline camp so one really amazing thing about offline camp is that it's run by the offline first community it's not tied to any company it's an international community of people coming from all different kinds of technical backgrounds and at IBM because we sort of found a way to help them because of our ties to IBM Cloud and the way that database works offline we can justify paying organizers to help organize this event and because of that there's a lot of work that goes into follow up afterwards we have a medium account that you follow up with campers and ask them to just kind of block out their experience and we're able to do all this extra work because we're paid for it during the day that you know really well makes the community more well rounded creates a lot more documentation about what happened at our events so if you didn't get to 10 you still get to learn about it and that really you know not only helps the community but all the participants better recommend too so if you have the ability to give your employees maybe just some like a volunteer day to go help organize or a small percentage of their time to help organize the community it makes a huge impact so next really you want to think long term you want to think outside of just one event so you could sponsor one conference and make an impact to that one event for that one day or two days but if you think about a community and you think about what you want to invest in a long term if you think more in terms of months years it makes such a much bigger impact on that community is the able to plan a lot more in advance on what we're going to do in the future Yana Leonard Alpany and Apache Couch TV said the best thing companies can do to help communities and events is to act selfless and not refer to immediate return investment the return always comes and usually with greater value than would have been achieved with strict ROI considerations so to think more long term you can certainly set a budget for pizza or snacks at a user group every month for a year you can set up dedicated space so that that group knows that they can use your space every month and maybe create an easy way for them to schedule their events there you could provide proper discounts so if that community needs to reply to speakers from other places offer to book the lodging and use your discount so that the group even if they pay you back they get a discount and it helps or you can provide free or discounted access to your services to the group as well the greatest gift you can get to any community organizer really is encouraging your employees to participate Tasha Scott of .NETTC and Code Camp New York said bonus points consider attending the attendance of a technical event as training hours and let your employees attend on work time you'll be investing not only in the skill of your employees but in their work life as well while keeping impact to the training budget though so skilled passionate technical resource technical workers are a precious resource to your company and there are endless reasons for you to encourage them to participate in the community if you're titled training dollars giving them calm time or allowing them to come into work late the day after they go to a meet up makes it so that not only will they get better but they also bring this skill back to your company as well so for people here you know there may be I don't want you to raise your hand but I bet there's someone here in this audience who didn't tell their boss they're coming because you might work for a company and I wasn't able to get anybody on the record to say this but you might work for a company that thinks because you're going to a tech event that you're trying to find a new job you're going to leave them and they may not be true but you might be here today because it's Friday you have to use a vacation day you're investing in yourself by being here and your community will get back to you for that investment even if your boss won't so Lorna Mitchell of PHP Northwest Comp and also a wonderful author and public speaker said I tend to tell people that the community will help them scale up and also make the connections for taking vacation time to do it and with family commitments and non-technical passions this privilege of extra time isn't available to everyone but if you have the time of ability there will be a pay off I promise you so you know stay in touch with the people you meet at this event if that is you you identify with that Rob Hill of HACVT and Vermont Code Camp said don't ask permission your employer is really not in time basically so if you're getting hesitation from your managers just don't tell them go anyway because you're really learning new things that will make you a better developer and a better technologist and a better member of your community also said I'm way more interested in building a healthy supportive community than meeting the needs of any board employer so if you're an awesome manager and you've brought some of your team here today but you know someone else in your engineering organization who isn't quite so open to that and those people under them suffer you know they're gonna do it anyways your company might as well benefit from it so you can offer com time but you can also ask them to report back about what they learned so if you can only four to send as much today as has videos that come out afterwards so most of you doing parties of content that was really relevant to your engineering team and then have a discussion about it afterwards or maybe ask them to give a training on a skill that they learned so not only do they get to benefit from learning these things and bringing them back and organizing their learning but your team as a whole gets to benefit from all this work too so in closing in all truth this talk is one for me I've been like I said I've been organizing community for many years and I had a lot of really crazy personal things that happened last year that caused me to burn out I quit everything for about four months I stopped to go to Valpa I stopped going to meetups I really just focused on my family and myself and in that time first I thought you know I'm not going back I don't know why I'm doing this anymore this is just and after like a few weeks and a couple months I got to really come in on why I was passionate about this work and what about it is so wonderful because getting to see people learning things is just so intoxicating and I have to keep doing it but I had to really rein in what I offer and be more respectful of my time and be better about asking people for this help so organizing this talk to me was really organizing those thoughts and when you organize or it needs a break right now and then it's important for you to take a break and really rein in on why you're doing this and what you want to be doing and that person also deserves to be part of a community that will step in and pick it up for them so a community that doesn't die is the one that needs to take a break so you know like I said as community organizers we're passionate and love people in our own special ways and they have a really hard say no so without support we inevitably give way too much of ourselves to burn out our community babies and come monsters and then it burns out the guys so it's important for you to find ways to contribute however small so I encourage everyone here after today if this event was amazing if you go back to your communities at home because I know a lot of traveling from other places think about your local user group and what you might be able to offer them and reach out to the community just check in you know you could suggest some things that you know that you can do so maybe you can just help with check in at the next event or by pizza for the next week after your attending you could there's a ton of options we can talk afterwards because I just blanked what I was going to say but if you do anything you're making a direct investment in the future of your community and just paying back a small portion at the very least if you see these amazing people at the bar buy them a cold one because they are good so I have some recommended reading on my slides they should be posted to Twitter I scheduled it so if you check my Twitter account you'll find them and you can read it a little bit more about how to support your community and I have some image sources here from my slides just so that I'm not lying and pretending I made them all myself but thank you so much