How do you define community?
We talk a lot about community in open source in general, and especially in open source startup world. But even with all the discussion about community building and community management, there are two critical questions that often go undiscussed:
How do you define community?
Why does community matter?
Let’s address the first question this week, and the second one next week. They are absolutely related, though — if you can’t define community, you can’t have a meaningful conversation about why (or if) community matters.
And here’s the problem: Different people will define community differently.
If you have 500,000 downloads, is that community?
If you have a million Github stars, is that community?
If you have a 100 weekly meetups about your project, run throughout the globe by people who are not your employees, is that community?
Ok, so it’s obvious (or should be) that the last example qualifies as community. But what about the first two? Are download numbers relevant when talking about community? Sort of — if you have 10 downloads, chances are you aren’t going to have hundreds of peole showing up every week for an in-person meetup about your project. But community requires more than someone to download and use your project — they have to be willing to invest their time and emotions into it. It’s a risk, because it often means publicly talking about the project and can mean tying a huge piece of personal and professional identity to your project. Think of someone who introduces themselves at parties as a Drupal developer or a Kubernetes engineer. If Drupal or Kubernetes do something horrible, the Drupal developer or Kubernetes engineer will look bad, too.
In fact, there are many solid, foundational open source projects that are widely used but lack community — sometimes because they are so low-level people don’t think about them, sometimes because the maintainers have never thought about how to build a community and focused exclusively on building a great project.
Different stakeholders, different definitions
One of the challenges in talking about community is that often the definition is going to vary by role in a company. The CTO might look at downloads — people using it! Marketing looks at social media mentions — people talking about it! Sales looks at the email addresses and cares about who works at a Fortune 500 company and downloaded the project. Investors might look at just one metric, or all of them. Everyone wishes they knew more about who is running in production, but often there’s not really that much information out there.
If building community is part of your strategy, it is important for all the key stakeholders to at least agree on what community is. You need to know what success looks like, otherwise you will definitely not reach it.
So, what do I think?
To qualify as a community, I think you need to have a group of people who:
Are willing to invest time on community activities
Are emotionally invested in the project
Get value above and beyond using the project from being part of the community
In my opinion, users and community members are not the same. You might have 100,000 users but only 1,000 people who are active on Slack or Discord. In that case, you have 1,000 community members. Some metrics I’d use for looking at community include:
Activity in Slack/Discord
Attending events (virtual or in-person)
Talking about the project on social media, in blogs, videos, conference talks etc
Any times someone outside your company is talking about the project, that counts as community to me. But when someone just silently downloads the project — even if they’re using it in production in their revenue-producing application at a Fortune 100 company — that isn’t community, even if it is a sign that your project rocks.
What do you think?