 I thought, you know, I want amazing people telling incredible stories, who are some amazing ladies. Leia was first on the list. I met Leia a few years ago. Yes, so I went on a road trip all over the country. I was living with my band. L.A. had defeated me at first and I gave up and I drove up the coast to San Francisco, to RubyConf. My band broke down in the hotel parking lot. It was pretty dire straights there for a few minutes and I was doing the hallway track and I met Leia and, you know, a ton of mutual friends. You know, she's been in my life for the past couple of few years and she's a totally rad lady and she organizes a few conferences a little bit bigger than this one. A little bit more professional than this one. Leia Silver. Thank you. I was really excited sort of when Jane asked me to do this, but I was also really, really nervous. I've done a little bit of public speaking, but probably not in like 10 years. I went to a school where once you got to the second grade, they pushed you in front of like 40 or 50 people every couple of weeks and you have to give like 15 minutes to a half an hour long talk and it kind of graduated as you got older to when you were like in the 10th grade and were probably talking to like eight or nine hundred people a couple of times a year. And it was pretty good and I didn't suck at it. I kind of thought I was pretty good at it back then but it's been a while so we'll see how it goes. I'm also in one of the like busiest times of my life right now. I got a new startup. It's my second startup where I've been here kind of since really, really early on and we're right in that phase. I'm sure you know if you've been at a startup where you're literally working like 20 hours a day and you're going to sleep for three and then you wake up again and just jump right back in and I've got like a major release coming up so we're right there. I haven't slept in a couple of weeks. I woke up like four days ago and I was like hmm that thing that I wanted to prepare really well for. We'll see how that goes. One of the reasons I'm nervous is because what I do is I build communities and one of the, I build developer community specifically and one of the key characteristics of a developer community for me is that it's really a meritocracy. It's not just a group of people who kind of get together and care about the same things. It is that but it's really one of the shining examples for me of a place where you can kind of come in, be nobody and really become somebody just on the basis of doing awesome things. So I want to be awesome because like I feel kind of like, to some extent I feel like a poser when I come to all these events because I'm not a programmer. And sometimes I try and people seem to really appreciate it. Like I was sitting on the floor at RubyConf in like, I don't know, many years ago and I'm sitting with Stephen Bristol from Less Everything and a bunch of other people and they were like we're going to teach you how to program. And I took out the like Chris Pine Learned Program book which I have never gotten through but have recommended to like a million people. It's awesome. Because like I was sitting on the floor there and one of the guys next to me was like, well last year I was working at, is that an animal of some sort? So this guy sitting next to me was like, well last year I was working at a retail job at The Gap and then I read this book and now I'm making six figures and I'm a programmer and it's awesome and you can do it. And I was like, wow, that's awesome. And I sat there and I read it and it got up to the chapter on flow control which made everybody laugh and make jokes about how it was a girl. It was actually kind of rewarding and I feel like that like five chapters I was like, oh now I get programmers. Because it was like really, I always had this appreciation for people who could do something. Like I feel like I'm a facilitator and I help people make their voices bigger and get them heard and accomplish what they want to accomplish. But when I look at you guys I see people who like have an idea, have nothing and create something. Which I'm not sure like exactly where it is that I draw the differentiators between what I do and what you do, but I kind of do. Like I feel like programmers are kind of like painters or contractors where they just throw things together and then you have this thing that couldn't exist before. And to me that is amazing and fantastic. And so in those like first few chapters that I read I like made this terminal window of playing 99 bottles of beer on the wall and I was like, wow, I just made something. And I was quite pleased. And every time I'm like, hmm, if I hit a pig and have millions, what am I going to do? I'm going to say I'm going to finish the first fine book. Maybe I'll win like HTML, CSS, wow. So one of the things that I always say when I describe myself is that I worship the altar of the developer. I think you guys are awesome. I know not everybody here is a developer, but a lot of you are. And that's also why I'm nervous. Because like I feel like a super need to impress. But so I got here and I started this giant list of notes about like all the things I wanted to talk about about like how to build developer communities and how to build communities and how to like balance things with licensing and with corporation versus open source and friendly versus professional. And I have all these notes which I think are kind of awesome. And then like two hours ago I was like, OK, now I have all my notes. I can know how they all like fit together. So I have like a giant document and I'll probably pick up my iPad periodically and I go, OK, what comes next? And look at my thread. But I guess I'll talk a little bit about me first, which I also took notes on in case I got really nervous and forgot who I was and why do I do it. But I came, I'm from Brooklyn, New York. I grew up in a really religious community, which I kind of feel like gives me a slightly different way of looking at things just because I got out into the real world when I was 18 and I had to really like learn all these things that other people already knew and like basic things like what's this other gender called boy and how do you talk to them. I have like, I have four sisters. I have a brother now, but I didn't for most of my life. He's a lot younger than me. And I went to an all-girls school my whole life and I didn't really have like a television that was accessible and I didn't go to movies or anything. I really like lived in my tiny little religious world. And then I was like, I'm going to go to college. I don't know, my parents sort of got more religious as I got older. So like, if you look at my siblings, they're totally like different people, nothing like me. But when I was a kid, I remember like what we do when we had like an empty Saturday afternoon is we would sit around and like read the reader's digest, like the big words where you have to guess which of the four definitions is the right one. And for some reason I like look back on that as like something that made me intellectually curious and like doing that and playing Scrabble and playing like risk strategy games. And so like from early then I was like, well how do you learn all these big words? You go to college. So I get to college and I get in the elevator like my first day and I have my book and this guy walks into the elevator and the door closes and I like back into the corner and I'm like, that's a dude. Should I talk to him? Should I say, what am I going to do now? And then he got up on the second floor and I was like, oh. It was very interesting. I like, I very vividly remember the first time that a guy asked me for my number in, it was in my psychology classes like towards the end of freshman first semester and he's really nice and he like sort of came from a similar background as me so I shouldn't have found it like very intimidating but he came over and he started chatting and he was like, can I have your number? And I looked at him like literally like completely close and I said, what for? And he's like, and then like five seconds later someone like nudges me and I'm like, oh, oh, oh yeah, sure. But I feel like I have, I kind of came into the world and had all these experiences that people had when they were younger and when they were children and that made them more comfortable and that for me made me a lot more analytical and made me think a lot about what makes people do the things they do and what kind of behaviors, I don't know, just like what makes people do what they do and I think developers are more like that than regular people for sure but for me like I had adult insights on things that you guys learned when you were seven or eight years old which was interesting. It made me awkward for a little bit but I think it's also what makes me really like community building because it's a lot about taking a group of people and sort of kind of smashing them into being a person when you're really good at the people that I look to as really great community managers are people who say things like the community hates this, the community likes this, the community's not going to like chocolate ice cream or whatever, right? And as you become more confident as a community manager in a big company you get comfortable saying things like that and you also get to a place where people believe you and you say like you can't put that XYZ button on the website of your open source project, the community will revolt or they will not like you when you lose these types of credibility. But yeah, so that's where I come from. What I do now, I work at a company called Stroh where I manage the marketing efforts but I'm really hyper focused on community marketing and I try to kind of have a good balance between having corporate marketing pieces and other things that you need to be a reputable company but also really paying mind to the fact that you only get one identity and it's not really super true when people in big corporations try to say like okay, our community lives there and here's everybody else and those people don't really care what we do here because they do and they hear it and when you put out a press release saying something outrageous or making you sound really big and really insert negative adjective here they look at it and they don't like it. So it's a tough balance and it's kind of a struggle because there's like a big magic book of marketing principles that you're supposed to follow in the sky and people and executives try to kind of make you follow them and it's sometimes hard to like say okay wait you have to respect this invisible person who I'm telling you exists who is called the community. But so I work there previously I worked at a startup not startup anymore called Engineering also building developer communities. I run developer conferences I do the annual Ruby Conference in San Francisco and I do the jQuery conferences around the US we do two every year I started the first jQuery conference I do various developer initiatives like last year I ran the Ruby Summer Code and the jQuery 1.4 program I helped start last year we had like this major marketing event released and I like doing kind of fun projects like that that I don't know I think marketing can be fun especially developer marketing is kind of awesome so that's my ramble about who I am and let's talk a little bit about what I do so when I got to college it was kind of I found college to be a really good microcosm of the real world I got really involved and I also at that time was kind of trying to find a way for myself to kind of get out of the that I grew up in it was awesome but it really wasn't what I was looking for long term I wanted to get out there and not live in this tiny little world and I got really involved I had like three jobs in college I did like the overachiever I want to have my own apartment one day earn tons of money things tons of money being like three minimum wage jobs at the time what do I do and I found the college newspaper which I got really really involved in I incidentally met my husband there that was kind of cool I guess but it was really awesome for me because it was like a giant crash course in the real world and we lived on that we went to this like really awesome computer campus that it's just strange like I haven't really seen what they have there elsewhere possibly because it's in like New York and everybody's like bigger than their britches and has an attitude I don't know but there was like a hierarchy and people had jobs and roles and everybody took it really really really seriously and when I joined the newspaper like there were press conferences with the college president and there was a whole political structure and like it was basically a job and I learned a ton about running a company I guess there because I did run a company when I eventually took over as the editor in chief I had like a staff of 30 people and I had an annual budget every year and accounting departments and all the kinds of stuff that you get there and you have to manage people and personalities and deadlines and all of that and it was kind of awesome the part of it that wasn't awesome by the way is that you get out of college having to accomplish the things that you do if you're involved in campus activities and maybe having gotten to the top of the food chain and then you get out into the real world and you're back at the bottom again and you're like I don't know whatever it is you're doing if you're writing crappy code or if you're getting somebody coffee and you're like I just came from a place where people were serving me coffee which is kind of what makes people not want to leave college I think it makes people kind of stick around because it's like a fast-forward little world that you can conquer and then it's like oh but I have to go out and start again but for me it was also my first experience with something close to meritocracy like I said our campus was really kind of intense we had these like third-year-old political parties where like alumni who were now like lawyers and politicians would like come back and help these like little college students campaign and build the marketing messages and like all that kind of fun stuff and there was this newspaper that I eventually ran and there was also a competing newspaper so it was like a campus of like 15,000 people and there was this hardcore like journalistic competition going on and it was the first time where just on a large scale you could really for me actively see like if you do a better job you will win because it kind of seems at a lot of stages of growth that that's not the case right because they might be shinier than you or they might be louder than you and the merit in what you're doing might not win over over that fluffy stuff but for us what to me constituted success at that time was that we had a really we got the faculty so like the other newspaper had lots of pages of like movie reviews and entertainment and a lot of students read those and liked the comics but when people really wanted to know what was going on with like the faculty union and when people wanted to know what was going on with the college budget and the I don't know like they got more audience when there was a shooting at the back of the campus a little bit dark it wasn't that exciting some like off duty cops sat down in the subway and shot himself in the butt but like they had this giant I don't remember what it was but a headline that was like cops shoot self in the butt or something right and they so they like had mostly because that week but when people really wanted to know what was going on with like important things they turned to our paper and when the faculty wanted to know what was the kind of the pulse of this new body they turned to our paper and that was my first experience of like if you're just a little smarter and do a better job you're going to you're going to win and if you if you kind of do this if you build it they will come I kind of think that's true for a lot of things but developed communities are a hyper example of it being not really dream you can't just build something you have to build something that is worthwhile and good and having a quality it's again it's like an audience where it's really hard to fool people and if you have all the shiny stuff but none of the meat then you're not really going to you're not going to get there and that's part of what I think corporations don't get about community sometimes is they think they just kind of throw a lot of big shiny resources at things that they'll have but it's really more like like I said earlier about treating your community like a person learning what its personality is and what it what it likes and you actually need to also be a person as a corporation right you need to be a citizen in that community and you need to provide as much value as any other person who's trying to make it or nobody really wants to hear what you want to say so it's kind of different like if you're running a community or a nonprofit or anybody else who has like a really good reason to build community with their customers and the same things but you have to I feel like to a much stronger degree actually make contribution and if you think about the corporations that you know in your various communities I hope if I'm correct that the ones you're thinking about are the ones who either employee developers building your open source projects or who fund developers or who like do things that directly kind of leads to a much better signal to noise ratio in general if you if your corporations in your community kind of act like citizens it can go I guess meritocracy can go bad a little bit like and you'll see this sometimes and I think this is sort of the case a little bit in the early Rails community where it can get a little bit too competitive or a little bit too clicky and like then kind of backfires and people feel like they can't get in but it's kind of relative to easy to get in just on merit and one of the important things that you want to focus on to kind of make sure that your community grows and you need it to grow right like if you're let's say a company or community manager you have finite ability to do things and affect things there's just a limited number of hours in a day and the way to kind of really make sure that you build something that then grows on its own and becomes self sustaining is to be building evangelists who are passionate about what you're doing and those people who are good communicators giving talks through screencasts whatever it is like those are the people that you really need to latch onto and really turn into your evangelists and your resources and that's how you get from 100 developers guys in their basements to 5 million developers in serious technology that big corporations are hearing about at the top level and evangelists will also help you do something that so it says to first of all you want one of the ways that you can just like money helps the community is kind of giving your evangelists the ability to help you whether that means funding then going to conferences or even just like giving them t-shirts and swag and materials that they can give out it really does make a difference and it kind of helps them feel more invested in success of the community but the other thing which is something that I've been to a lot of community talks and not a lot of people talk about this because so much of what you do day to day is like building forums and resources and monitoring the IRC channel or whatever your choice community is but it's really awesome and it's a really great way of creating more evangelists and getting people more invested when you get to end them in a room and they kind of talk to each other about what they care about and they don't get down some hole I don't know it was it was really fascinating for me the first few times that I that I went to develop a meetup because I just well first of all I didn't know what anybody was talking about but they all knew what each other were talking about and that was kind of strange to me because I was used to just watching and also because like as somebody who's not a developer I think if you're in a developer community we're going to a restaurant or when they're like insert corporate title here in some other corporation they don't love it nearly as much and they don't like eat and breathe it like developers do they don't all they do right it's your job you do it most of the time but it's it's very different like when they come home at the dinner table they start talking about their job most of the time it's complaining it's not like I wrote this awesome line of code today and I'm going to tell you about like offline like some of us have like spouses who are developers and friends who are developers and we get it's easy to forget that not everybody does some people are just like a guy with a wife and two kids and friends who do things completely different and it's like an intoxicating awesome experience when you get to like sit in a room with other developers and just totally geek out so yeah one of the things that I like to focus on about bringing is one of the things that I mentioned earlier about kind of being a facilitator is that having good logistics really really does matter and I mean you can do like this is awesome this is super casual and I'm really enjoying myself but when you're going to shouldn't say but I should say end when you're like doing this giant thing and things scale up right like I can't fit 600 people in this back yard I need to think about like where they can stand and like how many of them are going to have to wait online at the back between breaks and like the walking around and all that kind of stuff and I really do pay a lot of attention to the logistics of any on-site and logistics kind of in general I think that people people who are passionate will often times forget about the logistics because they just want to like get out there and talk about the stuff that they care about but if you do talk about it if you do think about it it really like maximizes your success and I run like a number of conferences I like to do when I run these conferences go down to the venue before and just like walk around like follow the schedule and walk around and you notice things that you just won't notice if you don't do that like that staircase doesn't actually fit people going up and down at the same time even though that's the way I'm at the recommend and I need to like think about that or these chairs are really uncomfortable or all the things like that right and like I should have signage over there and stanchions and those are the things that if people don't have to think about really compliment you on it because they didn't notice but that's like a huge chunk of what they're not complaining about because what they are complaining about when you don't think about it is how like the bathrooms were dirty and they didn't they were crowding at lunchtime and they couldn't get to all their food or at the user group there wasn't enough beer and the beer was in the front and people were talking to back and they couldn't get around so proximity to beer yes it's obviously very important so you want to you want to do one of the things I like just to bring it back again is give out swag I think it's really awesome when people can be proud about what they do and it makes them feel a little bit more invested also a lot of what I think about when I think about what to do is how do I make people feel invested in what I'm doing if you're just doing something and yet you want to think about getting people on board and like everything you do should be the beginning of a train and like get people walking with you otherwise you're probably not doing that for the job now I talked early about like the dangers of community stuff but there are things that we can learn sorry about corporate sponsorships and corporate corporations and corporate culture but there are a lot of things that you should take from that and a lot of things that sound sort of bad but aren't in community management like I really feel like I've learned this a little bit over time but you should have like a key message you should have a platform call it whatever you want you should have calls to action on your website and you should think about stuff like that like when they go to my open source project website like where is the download button how easy are they going to find it what about the design of this website how does that look and does it really reinforce my message and you want to be more sly about it I guess and you want to be more casual about it and you want to get up there on whatever community site you have or resource or platform and kind of spout stuff that's being driveled but you do want to have that list in the back of your mind the whole time like these are the four things I'm trying to accomplish these are the measurements that are attached to them and these are the direct steps that I'm going to do to get there and this is something that like I've has evolved for me because for me the the real thing you need is an instinct a good sense of what people like what they don't like what they care about how to keep them on your side but once you sort of develop that you can take it further and turn it into a measure of what they like and how do I like directly affect it so presentation matters for sure you don't want to be that like corporate sales person you don't want to have that feel of there's a difference between being super sleazy polished and having your act really together and like those are those are different like people a lot of times think if you have your act together you have to have that like smooth sheen of perfection and that big toothy grin but not so much so messaging like a lot of the I'm involved I'm on the jQuery core team and you have this right you have this right left do more tagline that is really like our main point that we hammer home and if you pay attention to Rails there's like the convention over configuration thing and I kind of don't think that those open source developers necessarily sat in a room and said what's our key message point how are we converting but they did it they came up with this one point you to succeed at what you're doing because then it's just consistent when two people get in a room and talk about what XYZ technology does and they don't agree then it's not really it's not helpful that's one of the challenges of what I'm doing right now and why I'm so busy all the time is I'm trying to build this new community around this technology called Sprout Corn it's been going really well so far but we are still kind of figuring out what's that one sentence that people think of when they think about our technology and how do we make sure that everybody else can communicate about it and help us kind of promote our message also the thing about corporations is that it's actually it's kind of fun watching small technologies get into corporations and it also is really for me about evangelism the way that the trajectory in Rails was just that you got to the guy in the basement and the the CEOs were like why do we care about the guy in the basement and I was like you'll see right they were in the basement and they got to their other 12 friends in their basements and then they all went to work at which way and AT&T and all these giant companies that they worked at and they said hey Mr. Big Boss I really like this new small technology and I've been playing with it and the boss said okay well you can start that small little micro project on it and then it had merit because hopefully what you're doing is awesome and then that micro project was a million times better than the 20 guys doing Java down the hall and that's how we did it some I see it laughing and I'm like I hope that's the I have persevered over a Java project as well laughter but it's kind of it was awesome that also like brings my thoughts back to the metrics when I first started in community management one of the things that I would always tell my bosses was I can do this and I can do this well and there are lots of stuff that we can follow but I can't really measure it and this is going to be a lot of front-loading and building love and loyalty and you'll see in a couple of years that or a couple of months whatever the timeline was for that project that it it really pays off but you really should only start this if you have a little bit of faith and it was true then for me because I was kind of new at it and now that I've been doing it for a number of years I know that you can measure community but I still kind of start out with the same spiel just because it really takes time to figure out what your community measure is and does it mean like people in my IRC channel does it mean on my mailing list does it mean downloads on RubyGems what does it mean is it some like strange concoction of numbers that I put into an algorithm I can remember is now 2,000 because I matched all those things up I don't know and you can do it but it does I don't know for your community it changes drastically but it takes a lot of time to figure out what it is and then to get all the numbers up to actually measure it and then have enough data to make sure that you're actually correct and that when you pull certain numbers certain things will happen but yeah you can do it and I think as as people get better at it it's going to be easier to evangelize community marketing as like a legitimate thing to do inside corporations but I don't know it's hard I went to a community management I went to like this meetup last week about measuring communities and I like walked out I went to three years ago so I think some people are thinking about it but like it's not there yet there's no like awesome canonical way to do these things and if you go from one company to another to another there are a lot of people doing different things and a lot of people just failing all together but it's hard to argue with the success of communities at least specifically in developer marketing and I know that like CEOs are coming around to those guys in the basement really matter to make them love us not just force marketing materials and sales people down their throats another kind of kind of gentle point that I think about when I think about like corporations and the beginnings of your project is that licensing really does matter I'm not by any stretch a licensing expert so please don't come up and ask to talk to me about it very much after but there is there's one big key difference I think really matters to your ability to foster community which is open source doesn't always mean open source what really matters is your contribution model you can have I've been talking a lot about this with Mr. Patch about what the right terms are and I think that the latest thing that we've settled on is like open source versus source available and when I think open source to me that means like people can contribute and get involved source available is more like you can look at the source there's not really much else that you can do and there are a lot of kind of big corporations right now trying to like muddle the lines a little bit and being like oh we're a big open source company but you can't get involved in their communities if they even have communities a lot of them don't and I think some of them are kind of sitting around wondering like hey this open source thing was supposed to give me a community and they're supposed to be like there's people around that would love what I'm doing and I think that's a big part of it is like you actually have to give people the ability to get involved in what you're doing to get invested and think about like open developers specifically are all about like who's really who's often and so there are a lot more knowledge getting those things done better to be able to jump into the cycle earlier give you feedback that you can do you should on the like marketing side and you decided when you built like a site for a for an open source project or initiative you kind of you don't want that corporate feel right but you also don't want that like I built this on Tuesday using my basement or something feel like right um what you you can do not corporate but still do really really well done and I'm sure you can think of like one or two examples I hope of this happening but you can probably also think of and how some of the like really awesome projects that you use just have like this page with like a logo and a download button and I think it does it is absolutely a good use of time and maybe not the developer time but somebody else in your organization to really focus on that and that brings me to something that I learned from the jQuery community which from early on has really embraced the thought of that the thought that not everybody on the 14 of your development project should actually be a developer um and at first it seems strange but it it really makes sense not everybody running the company at the bank is a banker right I mean somebody's the marketing guy and somebody's the janitor and somebody's the like the resource person um and the jQuery project really took on that approach in their project which I think is one of the reasons that we had evangelists we had event producers like myself we had people who like built the back end tools but like weren't involved in the actual technology that we were promoting and because we had that we were able to kind of we were able to actually succeed and not have rough edges in places where other people do because if you're all developers you're all good at developing but you're maybe not good at all the other things that need to happen I have no concept of what time it is okay cool well that's good because I was quite nervous that I was going to get up here and talk for 10 minutes and be done and then Evan was also telling me I shouldn't talk so fast which I maybe did we'll see but um but yeah those are just kind of I don't know those are some of my random like stream of thoughts about building developer communities it's awesome it's rewarding I love being surrounded by really smart people all the time and it's not something I think I would be able to have and I think that everybody should really embrace building a solid and successful community around their project do you have any advice or insight on helping people who are like sort of executive level people from the older world of keeping customers as far away as possible and being considered secretive and broadcasting to making them more able to understand more modern community concepts and source because you're right you're wrong you don't understand and you're like there's a community person and they sprinkle you know that community with us but I think community and then suddenly we get free patches and we don't have to do anything change anything we're doing we can sue anybody if we want to and blah blah blah so my immediate answer is like get a car with a really big trunk and an axe and just it's it's really hard to think this is why it's kind of challenging to find the right community manager community whatever role that they put in in every organization is because you really I guess I would say the kind of people who are really good relating to other people and communicating and being nice and noninvasive are not always the kind of people who are really good at telling their CEO that he just doesn't know what he's talking about and needs to trust them and that's just something that is going to come with experience like I think it's going to kind of fail the generation of community people who have grown up through this and who have developed the conviction and the experience to say listen you're wrong and you hired me because I know how to do this and you really need to trust me or you're not going to get the benefits of my experience and it will also like you'll also will be building examples of where it was successful and yeah I think Rails is a great example I'm focusing less on Rails right now but I feel really a sense of accomplishment for like kind of how to do with the Rails project and I feel like it really makes it I feel like that's something you can point to right like the skunk work path that I was talking about about guys in their basement and guys who like now have like into it running a giant like Ruby platform because they got fear at a meetup and that kind of stuff like we'll have more and more examples of that that we can point to and say like here's all the places where what I'm doing really matters yeah it's just going to take a little time and it's hard and you have to just repeat yourself over and get motivated and just like be strong about what you're saying just to back up your point about like why it's important to have more than just developers on the core team I'm not a developer myself so screw all you guys oh hey no sometimes people get people who know a certain thing so in and out have a really hard time viewing something that they built from a perspective of someone that isn't sort of connected to it that was both directions you know sometimes deaths of a hard time appreciating some of the user interface experiences because since they know all the ins and outs they don't see where they're glaring holds and also sometimes people on other sides of it don't understand enough to technology they don't understand how hard it would be to do certain things or how easy and so this kind of there so having people of different specialties sort of gives different perspectives which often is extremely valuable and sorts of things like I said they're not all bankers if they were they would not be running bank because it would fail I love the next series alright I have I have three questions but you can't answer only one of them so you can it's kind of like choose your adventure so okay so my question kind of is grounded in like these these companies that have their trade marks and they're like really holding onto these things and it disrupts a user community and so the first question is one as a user community how can we completely hijack the community away from someone like you the second question is what would you do if we tried to do that and how would you keep us from doing that and the third question is like how can we avoid all of that to begin with so you can kind of answer any of those questions so I I'm the person that you want to take it away from I'm doing a bad job I'm the person in the middle of both sides and keep the executives happy and keep the developers happy but maybe this is just me and the way that I like to do things but I'm on your side I understand what they want to accomplish which is why I can kind of fit in the middle and I get like we need to make money or have this number of XYZ things happen but I don't know I believe in the developers and I believe in their ideals and what they're trying to accomplish they're trying to take it away from me if you wanted to take it somewhere I'd be coming with you and I'd be helping orchestrate it as long as my boss is not watching it but that goes back to kind of the licensing thing that I was talking about earlier which is if your project is properly licensed and your corporation goes awry you often leave and it doesn't matter that they're gone and there's nothing they can do about it and that kind of keeps them in a spot where they have to keep you happy and it happens with Oracle and you see it happen and sometimes that means that they have to change the name of the project but it doesn't even matter because if everybody comes along with you all they have is nothing they have a shell and yeah again but that requires you having selected the right open source model and having they can own the trademark they can own everything it really doesn't matter the code is open you fork it you start again you're good so yeah and the third portion I guess which is like how do you not have it go that way is the same answer to the first question which is just it's really really hard there's no magical set of rules yet that I can point to but developers kind of also should probably spend more time trying to understand what the motivations are for the CEO and like some of them feel sleazy and some of them you don't want to be like a slave to the corporate overlord and making money but you also want to take that right like he does need to actually make money and do that even if it's not your top priority even if you just kind of want to feel something cool right you talked about building an individual community what about other communities that exist which might consider themselves somewhat competitive and then furthermore specifically what happens when one community is absorbed by another how do you sort of deal with that so it could be a generic answer well I have a very I was kind of involved with the Merb Rails Merge back in the day but so one of the I can't remember if I like talk about very much in my mainstream consciousness but one of the things that you want to try and do when you build your community is build an ecosystem and similar to the way that you want to build evangelists among your people is that you want to build other companies to help you do but again you can't do it all and Rails is an example of like a healthy timeline that happened and you have like those five companies doing screencast and those five companies doing training doing consulting and all everything you can think about that to me is super super healthy and that is what has allowed it to grow is that it wasn't like Rails Inc. by DHH where you have to put a stamp approval on everything right that would have completely hampered its ability to spread like it did so totally gloss where I was going so competitively I think that if you're clever about it like you can you should try if you're clever and you know exactly what your key differentiators are ideally there's something a little bit different than your competitor and it's something where people kind of think you're the same but you're not you know they focus on actually focus on why and with merging communities one of the things that we did was like how to sprout core compete with jQuery and which one should I go with and the answer is go with both right most projects have you can have a wide scope I guess but one thing that you're really really focused on and if you focus on that you should be comfortable playing nicely with things that do things better than you even if you sort of do them a little and maybe even merging them in and doing things like having this side project like handlebars is now a huge part I'm feeling shame standing next to me so I'm getting nervous and I don't know if I've just made a lot of sense but I hope so it's tough if you have something wrong your competitors are telling you you suck at something and you do just fix it don't like defend it be like my bad we didn't do that right we were focused on this and fix it and yeah try it from there sorry