Seasons of Community with Katy Farmer

Katy: [00:00:00] Oh, I think I, I work here now, but for free.

Matty: It’s time for Arrested DevOps, the podcast that helps you achieve understanding, develop good practices, and operate your team and organization for maximum DevOps awesomeness. I’m Matt Stratton. I’ve got a really great show for you today. I’m really looking forward to this conversation. I can’t believe that we haven’t had it yet. We have a little bit. We’ll talk about that in a minute when I reveal our secret guest. Our guests are always secret until you hear them talk. But before we get into that, how about a word from our sponsors? This episode is sponsored by CircleCI. Designed for modern software teams, CircleCI’s continuous integration and delivery platform helps developers push code with confidence. Trusted by thousands of companies, from 4-person startups to Fortune 500 businesses, CircleCI helps teams take their software from idea to delivery quickly, safely, and at scale. Visit arrestadevops.com/circleci to learn why high-performing DevOps teams use CircleCI to automate and accelerate their CI/CD pipelines.

Katy: [00:01:17] This episode is brought to you by cloud-native consultancy Container Solutions.

Matty: We bring culture, strategy, and technology together to help you get your cloud-native transformation right. To find out more, visit arresteddevops.com/containersolutions. This episode is brought to you by MacStadium, leading provider of cloud solutions built on Apple Mac hardware. As more teams are working from home, having your Mac build infrastructure in the cloud can make it easy for your app devs to work more efficiently. No need to have someone in the office keeping an eye on the Macs. Let MacStadium do it for you. And if you need a fast, scalable, modern way to run Mac virtual machines, MacStadium’s virtualization platform, Orca, is purpose-built for running iOS and macOS CI. Orca takes a standard macOS VM, puts it inside a Docker container, and then uses Kubernetes to orchestrate everything, all on Mac hardware. Orca is easy to integrate into your current workflow with plugins for all the popular CI tools, Like Jenkins, GitHub, GitLab, and Buildkite. If you’re building apps for the Apple ecosystem, learn more about MacStadium at macstadium.com/arresteddevops. From that link, you can also get access to a free 2-hour sandbox to give Orca a try. I’m really going to lean into this idea that we have a secret mystery guest because our guest is someone that I get really excited to talk to, and it just embodies excitement sometimes. So let’s get excited for our secret mystery guest, who is Katie Farmer. Katie, welcome to the show.

Katy: [00:02:59] Hi, Maddie. I’m so excited to be here. What a day. What a day to be a secret mystery guest.

Matty: Before we get into that, uh, tell, tell our listeners just a little bit about you, whatever, whatever comes to mind.

Katy: You know, first and foremost, I am just a delight. Secondly, I work at CircleCI. I’m a technical community manager, which means that I have like an ex— a background in engineering, a little bit of development, and a lot of people. So that’s, those are all the important things. Also like candy.

Matty: So as much as I would actually love to take the next 50 minutes to talk about candy, and I might have to go start yet another podcast just for that. Uh, maybe we’ll pivot and talk a little bit more about community. And I was thinking maybe talk a little bit about what it— about, you know, we talk about community a lot, and I think a lot of those of us that work in the community space where that’s our title, that’s our job, we’re trying to build communities, we’re trying to grow communities, we’re trying to really help the communities be awesome, but we’re also members of communities. And I think I would hesitate to, to, to guess, uh, as much as our sponsors wish I did. I don’t know that much about all of you listeners, but I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that a lot more of our listeners are members of communities rather than people that are trying to build them. So when I think about that as, as a, as a contributor, as a user, as someone who’s part of that, like, that’s the thing I want to think about is, is why— I don’t want to say why do they matter. I think we’ll get into that, but why are they the way that they are? You know, we sort of were talking about this a little bit before the episode, but we wanted to talk about— and yeah, you said one thing to me, Katie, that I thought was really interesting. And you said, you know, it seems like tech asks more from developers than other industries do from their communities or users or people that make them up. And I, I think that’s— I’d like to— let’s, let’s unpack that a little bit about about that idea because there’s a lot when we think about work-life balance and we think about, um, what we’re trying to help people do, you know, we’re telling people that you should be able to walk away from work, but then as an industry and as products, we’re actually asking for even more.

Katy: [00:05:25] Yeah, right. So every time we’re like, oh hey, I work at Company A and we make this thing that makes your life easier and you develop faster But then on the community side, we’re always asking people like, hey, build this, build this, like show us what you can do, right? And so I feel like we’re always kind of infringing on that. And it’s not necessarily that it’s a bad thing, right? Because it is voluntary. But I wonder like when I started doing community work, right? I was like, you know, checking on company Twitter account, et cetera. And I think like, I don’t follow companies on Twitter. Right? Like on my personal Twitter. So why would somebody follow ours? I’m like, why would we ask them to? Like, what are they getting here? And I think about that just a lot of like being part of a community a lot of times is more asks than receives, receipts, gifts. It’s more get— nope, it’s more gives than gets. You know what, I don’t—

Matty: [00:06:29] I, I was— I, I’m on, I’m on my like 4th or 5th rewatch of, of Schitt’s Creek right now. And there was a bit when, you know, the one character was talking about, uh, you know, she was explaining her relationship to her friend and she’s like, you know, it’s really about give and take. And like, Ted has really learned how to give and I, I’ve really learned how to, how to take. And I, you know, yeah, maybe it’s a really good metaphor. Maybe it’s not always— yeah. Um, which is, which is a shame to think about it that way, because if you were to really think about economy of scale, there’s a lot more members of community than maybe the, the organization that’s benefiting from that, so to speak, in so much as organizations can be entities, right? Legally, I guess they can, but you know, that’s different. That’s a different podcast.

Katy: But I mean, like, as much as, like, so I’ve been thinking about this a lot, which is that, like, You know, and we talked about this a little bit, is that like, we talk to community builders all the time who talk about just like, there’s a necessary sort of humanity at the center, right? But as much as I love people, and that’s like why I work with people, I don’t actually like to tell people I love people. So don’t, listeners, don’t tell anyone else. But I think also the community is like a really important part of the business model for a lot of these tech companies, right? Like, I worked at a company that had, like, a big open source arm, and it just, like, their core functionality wouldn’t work without the community who did this, like, open source contributions. And I think, you know, we’re asking for a lot, and we do, we do give our communities lots too, but, like, we’re also benefiting from that community Like in an economical sense, in, in a lot of ways.

Matty: [00:08:26] And I think like when you’re, when you’re trying to, you know, open source is where it sort of feels natural to have this conversation, you know, because there’s, there’s, there’s also a couple different things like what you’re asking the community when you, when you kind of look at the circles. And I know like Mary Thengvall’s talked about this before, and I’m gonna get it all wrong, so this is not me quoting Mary, this is me misremembering. But there’s kind of different rings of— if you think about the community of people involved with your product or your service, right? You know, you’ve got— maybe you’ve got people that are aware of it that, you know, need to know about it, that want to talk about it. You’ve got people that, again, if it’s an open source— if the product that has a freemium model or, you know, open core or something, you’ve got kind of your users of it that aren’t necessarily your customers. And then inside of that, you’ve got customers. And then really kind of at the, the center, you’ve got advocates. And, and in that case, it’s not advocates like a title, not like, you know, your developer advocate that works at your company, but actually advocates, the people who— and, and that’s, you know, again, this is the original advocates, right? For like the 3rd podcast I’m going to tell you to go listen to instead of this one is like, that’s a Community Pulse episode, right? About like where the gold is in building those, those advocates for you, you know, who— because that’s where scale happens. But what I’m thinking about is like, you can— it’s not all— I think it’s very easy to sort of fall into like what the community is, is again, people who contribute to our product. The community isn’t necessarily people who contribute to the code, right? Like, right, people contribute to how we think about this stuff, you know, whether they’re sharing what they do with it, talking about it, they contribute by telling people about it, by helping people, by, you know, For a lot of stuff, like how many people write awesome tutorials and do their own Twitch streams or do things like that, those are all people that are empowering the community and is also probably doesn’t get thought about a lot because it’s super duper hard to measure. Yeah, right. You know, um, but like, why when we say we’re asking, when we say we’re asking a lot of our community, like the easy, the easy place is to be like, we’re at, like you said, people who their model for their product is operating under the assumption that people who they don’t pay are going to do a bunch of engineering for them.

Katy: [00:10:53] And do it in a predictable, like, way. I think it’s really interesting to think about, like, we are starting to develop, like, community as a, I’m gonna call it a branch of business, like a branch of the government, right? It’s like, if community isn’t a success, if you don’t have the community arm of this like business, then, you know, then it stalls other marketing efforts, right? Because, and then it, that stalls sales and et cetera, right? And I wonder like we do, I mean, depending, right? Like for some people it’s like a very, you know, it’s a light ask like, oh, hey, just show us what you already did at work. But a lot of people do this in their free time. And I, I just think a lot about like, what makes it worthwhile? Like, what would I do that for that I use, right? Like that I’m not getting paid for. And that’s a tough question. I tried to think about like, what would this look like outside of the tech industry? Like, what is a community? What is another business that has community like this? That’s not software.

Matty: [00:12:06] I mean, a lot of it connects to brand, you know. I mean, you think about, especially with people being advocates, and I’m not necessarily going down like the, you know, paid influencer route or something like that, but they’re, they’re really— I think there’s a lot to do with people getting excited and about things that they use. I mean, you know what’s an example? It’s not, it’s not a product that you own or something, but like think about something like CrossFit. Right? You know, these are businesses that are very dependent upon their community because, I mean, I, I know we said not tech, but I, but I still think about like Peloton. Yeah, you know, stuff like that. I think, I think there’s actually— I’m almost going to go back and slightly challenge the statement that the other organizations like don’t have these asks of their community because I think community, um, has become kind of almost a requirement if you’re creating a product, right? Because people want this network connection to other people who use this thing that they also use, right? And you see that, uh, again, I’m gonna go back to Peloton a little bit. Like, there are things being created, not necessarily code being slung, But just ways to think about this that people who are just advocates, you know, and enthusiasts, uh, put together. They put together networks of, of, of people, you know, that’s all outside of what’s built into the product, and that brings extra value to the product. And maybe it’s— maybe you won’t see another industry that’s going to be as specific like this because I can’t directly contribute to You know, um, you can’t go design a better Peloton. I can’t go design, right? I can’t go like work on the assembly line at Ford or something like that, right? You know, I mean, and just show up when I want to and be like, hey, you need any screws turned on the bolts today? I can do it for about 20 minutes.

Katy: [00:14:09] You can trust me. I’m a—

Matty: yeah, I got it. Don’t worry about it. Well, you’ll have somebody will watch and, you know, make it— yeah, it’s fine. That’s, that’s, I guess that’s like a code review. I don’t know. Is this metaphor starting to fall apart on me?

Katy: Yeah, a little bit, but that’s okay. I think, I think you’re right. It’s, I think the democratized portion of community and tech is that the skillset itself is kind of lends itself to that involvement. So the community feels different because we make things for developers and developers also have the same skillset that we’re building. So like they can build the thing we’re building. They just happen to be building something else.

Matty: Well, you know where it gets interesting, and I, I might, if I can find the meme, I had one, but it was, it was something about, um, like, you know, what do you do in your spare time? Well, I do a bunch of things that look like work, but they’re not work. And I was like, I have this conversation on every dating app constantly. When people are asking me, what do you do? And I’m like, you know, I work on this thing and I have this podcast, I have this stream, whatever. And I’m like, it’s not technically my job, but it’s an awful lot like my job versus— so I think that’s where it gets kind of weird with this, where we’re saying like, you do this stuff on your own time, which you might do for a product or a service that you really enjoy, but you probably— that’s not also your job, right? You know, so again, if I, if I’m creating this cool way to like bring Peloton riders together in some sort of a connection, something like that, I’m probably also not a physical trainer.

Katy: [00:15:46] Right.

Matty: Or if I am, I’m getting paid for it. Right. Like that’s, that’s sort of the thing is that we find that, yeah, what we’re asking of our communities to help them be better is almost by definition also their act, the thing they did all day at work too, you know? So it really feels a lot more like volunteer work.

Katy: It’s—

Matty: except, you know, it’s not. Yeah, I guess, I mean, maybe that’s the thing. Maybe we’re not— that’s fundamentally— and maybe if we reframe it that way and think about open source contributions is also— can be, can be, because a lot— I want to be clear, like, people can contribute to open source as their job and be paid by their company to do that. So what I think we’re talking about here is people where we’re asking them to do that when it’s not their job. That’s volunteer. That’s volunteer work, you know. Let’s call it what it is.

Katy: I think it’s interesting to think about it that way because then you have to assume that the, the reward then is not necessarily for them, right? Like, when I think about volunteer work, like, I’m gonna go plant a tree on the highway. That’s something my mom always, uh, I’m gonna say made us do. We were children. We had no will of our own. She always made us go plant trees on the highway in the summertime, uh, in California, and it was miserable, uh, and dangerous, but we planted so many trees, right? That wasn’t like— I mean, it was for us in a very grand sense, but like, you know, it was for other people. Like, yeah, we made some trees, great. And I bet— I hope they’re still there. I hope they’re grown now.

Matty: [00:17:24] I hope—

Katy: I’ll go drive down the I-5 and see what’s up. But I wonder if that, um, If we think about it in that, in that way, like you’re planting this tree in the community, like you’re not going to see the results of that. So like, what is your incentive? Is it just to like make your day-to-day easier? Like, oh, I just made this. I needed this like plugin for, you know, my specific like setup. Uh, and then everyone else uses it and they keep helping because they can. I wonder, is that the reward? Is the reward just knowing that like you did a thing that nobody else did?

Matty: Here’s, here’s what it comes down to. And it’s the same thing about anything when we’re talking about DevOps and transformation and culture is just realizing there’s not one reason, there’s not one thing. So again, why we talk about behavior, behavior isn’t driven by incentives, you know, and different people will choose to do this, this work, this volunteer work, or whatever, this engagement in the community, just doing these things for lots of different reasons. You know, like, I like to be a part of a community because it makes me feel like then people know who I am, right? It’s, it’s an identity thing to me, right? It’s I am part of that community, and I like to be known in that community. I can admit to myself, you know, that about me is that I am recognition-driven. Um, not everybody is, right? And some people are driven by, you know, satisfaction of solving a problem. You know, it’s like just knowing that they did something. Some people are maybe just— you know what, I don’t— I don’t— this maybe is going to be indication of something a little more toxic, but I mean, I could totally see the reason someone might want to do it is because it makes them feel good that they figured it out and nobody else did, right? Maybe makes them feel smarter than everybody else. That doesn’t mean they’re smarter, but it’s okay to feel smarter. You know, yeah, like, be proud, you know.

Katy: [00:19:19] I feel like I have seen that, like, you, you want to be the first one to, to do the thing, right? And like, I think that when we start depending on community as a business function, we say like, okay, well, the commu— the community, as if it’s one like monolithic thing. But like, we’re like, we’re sort of getting into here, it’s like, it’s complicated in there, right? Like, one of the things at my job that I was gonna do early on was like, okay, well, what’s like the persona here, right? Like Um, and then the more I talked to people, I was like, I think I’m bad at marketing, y’all, because I do not— I don’t know how you can build personas off of like all these very different people that I interact with and talk to. And like, I maybe I have some buckets now where I could be like, ah, this person is swag-driven and this person is recognition-driven.

Matty: Whatever.

Katy: But like, I still think that it’s like a very complicated, like, and you have to be able to like treat people differently. Like I definitely, like if I’m talking to a vendor and I like the product, you know, I’m part of their community, but also there’s like this professional limitation. Oh, I need to use this. And I do like it. It works really well. Like I expect to be treated a certain way in that community. Like I still expect to be treated like a customer, if that makes sense. Whereas if I just like want to get on Twitter and talk about like, if Laffy Taffy has new flavors, cause I’ve been waiting for them to drop. Like I don’t expect Laffy Taffy to treat, even though I am legitimately just a customer in that case, I don’t actually expect Laffy Taffy to be like, oh, we value your opinion, ma’am, about the new banana flavoring. Like, Never change the banana flavor. It’s the best flavor. And I, but I would expect like to have like a little less value because there’s more people in that community. And also just like, I feel like that relationship between me and that company is like fundamentally different than like a tool I pay for and use.

Matty: [00:21:32] I just want to be clear about what I think Katie has just admitted to is that she steals Laffy Taffy. Because the implication was you do not pay for Laffy Taffy.

Katy: Look, they put it in jars. It’s like the little— I was taught that when food goes in bins, it’s basically free.

Matty: It’s basically free.

Katy: Yeah, it’s a sample situation.

Matty: So, and I think the other thing is tricky is like, this is the whole problem with the persona thing, is that first of all, people don’t fit neatly, and also your persona may differ depending upon the time of year, like as you move through your life, as you move through your day, as— and also I may have a different— right, I may have a different persona in one community than in another. Like, and so I think, I think this idea of— and I don’t, I also don’t think personas are supposed to like be like Katie Farmer is this way. It’s like someone who— and so the thing is, if you can sort of map to them, you’re like all the people that sort of fell over here in the sorting bin at this moment, like, we have something for them. And that’s, to me, like, the thing I think that matters is not so much to be like, how do I target you? Which, again, I can understand why you might need to do that. But like, when you’re thinking about in a community, you want to be— and I guess let’s, let’s take this another way— is when you think about your community’s participation, I think it’s really a challenge. And this is, you know, Uh, to be inclusive of the different reasons and ways. And the, the ones that make sense to us may not, you know, it may not occur to us that, yeah, that’s a thing that matters to somebody, you know, because I haven’t worn that persona hat before or recently.

Katy: [00:23:14] Yeah. And I think it’s interesting too. So one of the prob— one of the, the questions I always ask, I guess, is just like, as a community manager, not as a community member, is like, okay, well, like, what problem are you trying to solve? And do I have the thing that solves that?

Matty: Right?

Katy: But like, I think there are a lot of situations, like we were talking about, they don’t make good examples, like food, candy, whatever, because you don’t have a problem that it solves. I have a need. I have a great need for sugar and I have a specific problem, but—

Matty: I was going to say, well, the problem is that you don’t have candy and Laffy Taffy solves that problem by having you I now have candy.

Katy: So, you know, wait, there’s like, there’s like all, you know, like if you’re at work and you’re like a mechanic, you’re like, okay, I have to fix this car, but I need a wrench. And there’s like 45 wrenches to choose from and I just need a wrench. You know, like I feel like that’s fundamentally, you’re, you’re going to be a community member of one of them, right? You have like these like limited options, whereas I feel like there, when you get outside the world of tools, whether they’re hardware or software, you, you enter this like you have a greater variety of things. I need sugar, like I could just do a shot of maple and right, yeah, go for a jog. I’m not saying I’ve never done that, it didn’t end great for me, but if you’re gonna offer me a maple tasting, do it outdoors. That’s my only advice. I had to really run it off.

Matty: [00:24:53] I mean, you know, everything comes with a price, even maple syrup, right?

Katy: Yeah. I don’t know. I guess I just think a lot about like, maybe it’s because I probably spent more time in community than in engineering, but sometimes I think that what I’m asking community members for, or, you know, if I’m using something like what that community is asking me for, is kind of big. Like, for me, I’m like, this is bigger than, like, what I’m doing at work today. So it’s worthwhile, but it’s also still like, I just feel like it’s worth acknowledging, like, how much we ask of developers. Like, well, we know this is your job and you write code, but this would be different code and it would be for free. How do you feel about that? And then we just are like, I am constantly surprised by the number of people who are like, absolutely, I would love to do that. And I’m like, interesting.

Matty: And I, I think where it gets frustrating too is because you want to treat this work with value and it, it requires, um, rigor, but that’s not as much fun, right? And I think, I think that’s sort of maybe the— I don’t want to say the danger, but I think where it gets a little fuzzy and a little weird is when you’re depending— if you’re depending upon, uh, community contributions. And you touched on this a little bit earlier, which was like, it’s not predictable, right? Right. You know, you, you don’t have a burndown chart, you know, or whatever they— whatever would be the appropriate agilista metaphor or whatever implementation of that to sort of be like. It’s— and, and I think communities like— and that’s where you start to build as they get bigger. You have people who actually can have as a paid job, they can manage the project, right? Quite literally. But still, how do you capacity plan? How do you, you know, it’s like stuff still gets done when, you know, you, you, you, uh, not that anybody can predict anything even when you are paying the people, but, you know, you could, you could have, I mean, how many, I, I can think of lots of projects that I’ve worked on you know, not even connected to a company, but just the thing where there, you know, I have several open source projects and then like it will happen pretty consistently. Actually, the theme, the podcast theme that I wrote that powers this podcast and quite a few others is open sourced. And I, even me, it’s my project and I go in swaths around when I pay attention to it. I do, I will say if you’re a CastNet user, you have a defect I’ll notice it and I’ll do everything I can to fix bugs, but enhancements— but every now and again, someone will adopt it, you know, adopt using it, and then they want it to do other things. And then people, you know, I’ll have someone who’s a really active contributor for like a couple months, and then they’re done, which is fine. Like, you know, because either solved their problem or didn’t or whatever.

Katy: [00:27:56] And—

Matty: but you can’t predict for that, right? You know, so like if you were to look at the throughput of enhancements on this project, it’s very spiky, right? It’s like, you’ll go 8 months of the year and there’s nothing. And then there’ll be like 7 new features in 2 weeks.

Katy: Yeah.

Matty: Right. You know, which for a small podcast theme project is totally fine. But I think that happens still at a higher level with bigger projects too, because, you know, it’s you kind of— it’s a little distributed because it’s not just one or two people swooping in. So maybe you kind of— everybody evens themselves out a little bit. But I, I think it’s hard to depend upon that. And also just what if it stops being interesting? You know, like, I think— I know there’s definitely vastly more interest in a project if it gets a lot of press or it’s using a framework that’s real exciting right now.

Katy: And But, you know, I mean, if people stayed in communities forever, I would still be writing essays about Digimon.

Matty: [00:29:04] So why aren’t you still writing essays about Digimon?

Katy: I mean, I, I probably could. I still have thoughts, but, you know, I’m not as active on the Digimon forums as I once was, right? Like, we all have these, like, sort of seasons of, like, oh well, this one, this I have the time for, the energy for, for whatever reason. And I think Like, to take it a step farther, even like as a community member, there’s like the ambassador programs, right? And I, I think about those quite a lot because I think when I was younger, before I was in tech, if I was— I was, um, it wasn’t, it wasn’t ambassador, but basically at my college they were like, hey, you use, uh, Hotmail and just like they chose random students to talk to about Hotmail and like gave them gifts and stuff.

Matty: You were a Hotmail ambassador? That was a thing. That’s kind of cool.

Katy: I think it was random, but I was still like, I am so special. And I got some money and like a, like a sweatshirt or something. Not like a cool hoodie, just like a straight up sweatshirt.

Matty: [00:30:12] Pullover sweatshirt.

Katy: Yeah.

Matty: Yeah.

Katy: Just a nice jumper. Um, And I think that like, there’s a point at which you’re like, this feels great. I feel so special. But also a lot of those programs are like, by the way, here’s the criteria to be one. Here are the things that you have to get done. You have a second job now, which is to maintain this status. And like, for me, that’s like, it’s too much. It’s too much pressure. So like, how do we give people the freedom to be like, Occasional, like I would be an occasional ambassador. Like if, I don’t know, I was gonna say Lisa Frank, but because they were like my childhood brand, but I’ve learned that they’re like really not that cool. So sorry, Lisa Frank, I’ll make my own neons. There’s a, there’s a point at which there’s a thing you love and they will tell you that you’re special and ask you for something and you’re like, oh my gosh, finally the recognition. But there’s like a tipping point where you’re like, Oh, I think I work here now, but for free.

Matty: [00:31:16] Especially when it’s within a company, you know. So, for example, like CNCF Ambassador is maybe a little different. I’m gonna say why in a second. I’m gonna go back to that as an example. But within an organization like one, you know, like when I worked at, you know, not picking on PagerDuty, but I’ll give the example. Like a company like PagerDuty or know, when you’re building advocates, the thing that’s rough is the first couple you get, it’s a lot of pressure on them and they don’t even work for you because all of a sudden that entire company is full of asks for you because you are that proto advocate, right? And, and for whatever reason you stumbled into it, you know, because it’s— and, uh, and I think that’s sort of a thing for organizations to think about is that, like Katie said, you know, if you’re gonna want to recognize people, don’t— your tendency is going to be having lots of things you want them to do for you, but really what you want to do is facilitate and encourage them to continue to do what they already did if they want to. Yes. And not also, also because I know there’s lots of marketing and DevRel departments out there right now that are tracking all of their advocates, their external advocates, It’s— they trust people. If, if you love a product out there, they know, they know, and you are in, you are in a CRM, right? And they will freak out when you stop being a super fan for just a hot second. And you might— so my reason is don’t make that your KPI. That’s going to make you like, that’s going to set off some kind of PagerDuty alert to your DevRel team because Katie Farmer doesn’t love Twitter for Pets as much as she did a minute ago. And but she’s our only one, so we’re totally freaked out. And then we’re gonna, you know, and it could just be she’s like, I’m sorry, it’s the Laffy Taffy convention this week. I didn’t give a shit about Twitter for Pets for a while, you know. Or I, I don’t use Twitter for Pets at the job I’m at anymore, you know. And, and it’s okay. So like that sort of thing. I’m like, there’s a like an event horizon, if you will, or there’s a certain, um, a certain point of scale where your ambassadors can just sort of be people that you recognize because your community is large enough and there’s enough of them, right? So I think about like CNCF ambassadors or things like that where it’s like, and people want that recognition. And I will say, this is the other thing I believe, and nobody’s going to want to hear this, um, DevRelians and stuff, but like, I, I think you can’t— I always like to say you can’t manufacture a moment. And I think you can’t trick people into wanting to be your advocate. Like, what you need to do is you need to see where it’s happening and nurture it and, and, and do everything you can to make it easier for those behaviors to happen. But what you can’t do is you can’t create them, right?

Katy: [00:34:10] Hotmail learned that with me. I didn’t become a lifetime Hotmail user from my, like, semester being recognized, you know. I just, like, I got some stuff and then I was like, okay, I’m out. Like, you stop talking to me now, I’m, I’m busy. Like, I totally agree with you in that, in that regard. It’s just like, if it’s not happening organically, I think you’ll always know. That doesn’t necessarily mean you, you can’t do other things, but I— one of, one of the questions, and I think this has to do with like things that happen organically and this like idea of a moment is I remember early on, the first time I was asked to sort of start working on like a brand ambassador program, the example that was given to me was Docker Captains, which was great. Right. And I mean, it might still be, I’m just out of the loop. I don’t know, I don’t really know where Docker stands these days, but The thing about Docker Captains was not just that they were doing a lot of work, but that like, that was like a really valuable skillset on their resume. Right. People would hire them because they were a Docker Captain. And so that was its own like, oh, that they’re doing a lot of work, but it’s making them like more, more valued in the community. And like, not even just like on a, you know, emotional level, but just like literally they’re getting paid more because they do this. And I don’t know if that— and that felt to me like they created this brand ambassador program, but like organically that skill was like so valued that it became its own, like, oh, this is like, this goes on your resume. Whereas I wouldn’t put, you know, like I was a Hotmail ambassador, Hotmail ambassador, my resume. I would be like Oh, um, actually pass on that. Like, you know, I wonder, like, those— that happened organically because there’s this whole ecosystem that started demanding the expertise and things really, like, lined up. And I don’t— like, I tried to sort of tell my management at the time, I was like, I don’t know if that’s, like, repeatable in, in the way that you’re looking at it.

Matty: [00:36:30] You can’t manufacture. And I think what you, what you can do is you can grow things organically by making sure the soil is fertile and it’s watered and everything, but what might grow might not be the organic avocado that you wanted. Oh my God, I can’t believe I, I didn’t even do that on purpose. But maybe it’s an artichoke or maybe it’s a banana, right? You know, and it’s okay cuz those are good too, or it’s gonna look a little different. And I think it still goes back to the outcomes, right? You know, like what’s the outcome you’re trying to accomplish with this? You’re trying, you know, and And I think it’s setting realistic expectations. You know, I mean, you said, you know, someone sees that, they’re like, how do we make Docker Captains happen in our company? I don’t know, be Docker at the right time, right? You know, be Docker at that time, and then that will be there. So maybe, but maybe you can still get some of those outcomes, but you’re not going to do it the exact same way, you know, or I know I, you know, I had a friend who was a community manager for a— put it this way— a company that was not only not an open source company, you know, was a paid software service that had vastly fewer users than Ubuntu. But he was held to that, well, Ubuntu has this many active users on their forums, right? Why don’t we? And you’re like, let me tell you all the reasons why we don’t. You know, partially it’s because it’s a You know, you know, it’s, it’s a, it’s a service that we’re providing, you know, it’s a SaaS, you know, so there’s just not as many problems to solve. Also, Ubuntu is huge in what it— besides number of people using it, and it’s broad, right? In this particular other product, there’s only so many things you can want to do with it.

Katy: [00:38:16] You can literally almost want a cap on the number of people who could be in the community in the first place.

Matty: Well, the more people can be in the community, but also even so, it’s like It just does these things, whereas an operating system has to deal with so many more things that people are curious about, right? You know, so it’s just be realistic about where that happens. And, and I think this goes into a little bit of overall late-stage capitalism hypergrowth problems, which is, yeah, your community— the value of your community is not inherently based on the number of people in your community. It’s what value are they providing, right? You know what I mean? And I— so that’s the thing, it’s like, and you’re seeing, you see people, you know, whatever measure you’re using to measure the size of your community to see like, am I getting month-over-month growth? And like, at a certain point, no, and that’s probably fine, right? Like, like, um, so how do you— okay, well then I’m gonna ask you this, okay, community and candy expert. Katie Farmer, you, for recognizing my authority, your, your, your, uh, the multitudes that you contain. How do you measure the value of a community?

Katy: [00:39:27] Man, it’s so hard.

Matty: How do you— how do you— I don’t even say measure because that’s going to put us down a metric number. Like, how do you— and I don’t want to say how do you quantify. Like, measure is the word I want, but I don’t want this to be a, like, a KPI. It’s like, yeah, how do you, how do you observe? How do you observe?

Katy: And how do you measure a year? Exactly. Thinking of just like, I’m having a big Rent moment in my head where I’m just, how do you measure? So I think, I think I get what you’re getting at because we’re measuring it, but we’re, we’re not like, yeah, it’s not a KPI. It’s just when I— and I’ve had this sort of conversation with, with leadership at various companies, which is that like instinctively, like if I’ve been at my job for a year or more, I know how my community is doing without giving you numbers, right? I can say like, no, I think that like we got problems. Or I can tell you like, no, they’re doing really well and they’re very happy. Because I get like in the position that I’m in, I interact or at least see like every community interaction, right? I’m like, On the company Twitter, I’m on the forum. I’m in all the Slack channels. Like I talked to everybody and even if they don’t know I’m there, even if I just like, because I have all the feeds pulled in, you know? So I have this sort of like ongoing internal measure of like how I think things are going. And most of the time, I think For me, I sort of measure a community that I’m in, like, so I’ll do this in 2. So like one that I’m in, like a manager of, and then one that I am participating in. So a community that I’m managing, I think is successful if people are asking lots of questions and getting interaction. Doesn’t have to be solutions, like doesn’t always have to be answers, but like if people are curious, that’s always a really good sign for me. Uh, so I measure community in curiosity.

Matty: [00:41:47] 525,600 follows. That’s your— that’s how you measure, measure a community. Um, no, it’s not. No, it’s not. You didn’t hear that here, but I think that, I think that that really put a nice, nice bow on that, you know, about where that, where that impact comes. And it gave me, this has given me a lot to continue to think about. So I hope, uh, dear listeners, we got your brain, brain gears twirling a little bit.

Katy: You know, I want to hear more from, from listeners. I want to, I want to know what questions they had or if they were listening to us and being like, that is Wild.

Matty: So if you want to, if you have been listening, and if you’re hearing this and you haven’t been listening, I don’t know how that happened. I mean, if you maybe press 30-second skip a whole lot because we have so many ads. Um, love you sponsors. So yeah, Katie, if people want to, uh, tell us what they’re thinking about this, where can they find you on the, the Twitterspheres?

Katy: [00:42:51] I am always on Twitter and my handle is The Cater Tot, like a tater tot, but with a Katie.

Matty: But with a Katie, but with a Katie.

Katy: The Cater Tot.

Matty: Yes. So yeah. And if you, I was going to say, usually I’d say head over to arresteddevops.com/seasonsofcommunity for this episode’s show notes. I don’t know that I’ve got a whole lot of show notes from this one, cause this was just a lot of thoughts and ideas. So let’s take the show notes to Twitter, you know, tweet at us @TheCaterTot and @MattStratton, and let’s continue this conversation. If you go to arresteddevops.com/itunes, you can leave us a review in the iTunes store that, that can actually help people find this podcast. And, you know, rate, rate and review, like and subscribe. We’re also on Spotify and iHeartRadio. If you use those systems, those are places to listen to us. So Katie, this was a lot of fun. Thanks for joining me today.

Katy: Thank you, Matty.

Matty: As always, this is Arrested DevOps, and remember, There is always DevOps in the banana stand.