“It’s not all about fun, but we have a lot of it anyway” — why Developers join Tech Communities
“Our role as Community Managers is — just let people have fun” — that’s what I heard some time ago while talking with another community manager.
It wasn’t my day and I only shook my head without deeper discussion. But this sentence followed me for a few days. It didn’t resonate with me. Did someone just tell me that my work is simply to create some entertainment? Did someone just tell me that my community members are only people looking for fun? I needed to touch on this topic and dig deeper. And since I work with tech communities I focused on software developers. Why do they join communities? Is that fun? Or maybe it isn’t about fun at all?
As a Community Manager, I never tried to act like Mrs. Know It All. Rather the opposite — I always treat community members as my partners in crime and one of my golden rules is “build with your community, not for your community”. So instead of creating my theory, I simply asked myself: “Who could tell me why developers want to spend their spare time contributing to any community?” And the answer was obvious — Developers! And went straight to community members.
But before we’ll jump deeper into this topic and because I’m not a native English speaker, let’s start with the definition of “fun” (that’s what I did at the very beginning):
Not that helpful. It’s short, very abstract, and subjective. For instance, the idea of fun for one of my friends is having some craft beers in a pub. As for me — I hate beer…
But it led us to the next step: first of all — know your audience! Developers are a huge group of various people, with various personalities, etc. And we don’t want to (and we don’t have the capacity) ask everyone. And let’s be frank — also we don’t need to involve everyone in our community. That’s why we build Persona individually for each community. And here is a general one I created for a need of this research to help me reach out to the right group.
Looking at that we can imagine a perfect ideal Tech Community member — always searching for an opportunity to develop, learning new tech stacks, and enjoying solving problems. Based on that I posted a short survey on my LinkedIn and asked developers in my network: “What’s the most important factor for you when joining the tech communities?”. Here we have the poll’s results:
At this moment I could close my research and say “Ha! No! It’s not about fun!”. The results showed very clearly that actually, it’s all about knowledge. And well, I wasn’t surprised. But to be even more precise, I decided to push this topic further. I took a risk of being a bit annoying and shared with a group of devs one more survey with only one open question: “Could you please tell me what’s your definition of “fun” in the community?”.
“Opportunity to solve programming problems”
“Sharing my knowledge and learning from others”
“Meeting new people who have the same interests”
There were more similar responses.
The reason to join Tech Community isn’t about having fun. But definitely, it’s a substitute — developers have fun while doing things they love, helping others, and developing their skills. Additional fun is always welcome but it isn’t the main thing here.
The role of the Community Manager isn’t delivering entertainment. I truly believe that our number one responsibility is creating a safe space where people can develop, belong and create meaningful things. Do you want to see higher engagement? Listen, talk and support your community members. And trust me — they will have plenty of fun. But if not… well… I will repeat after Alex Bogusky “if you’re not having fun, you’re doing it wrong”.
