The Value of Community

September 22, 2023

Updates

Let’s Talk Community

Today I’d like to talk at a high level about community: reasons for joining them, what value they provide to their members, and how they might evolve from a simple hangout to a group of people with a positive mission.

Since this is the System Crafters community I’m looking particularly at what our community means for us, but also at the broader communities we’re a part of: free software, Emacs, Guix, Lisp/Scheme, Linux, etc.

I don’t have all the answers here! I am also looking for your ideas and experience about how communities should operate and what they can accomplish.

Why join a community?

  • To get help with a problem
  • To help other people with problems
  • To geek out about things they’re interested in
  • To contribute to a mission that is personally meaningful
  • Because you think it sounds cool or you see nice people there
  • To do something productive with your time that you actually want to do
  • To mentor or to be mentored and learn more than you could on your own
  • To keep up with news in a particular area
  • To quickly ramp up in a complex topic area (like Emacs)
  • To socialize with people outside of their local area
  • To share what you’ve been working on in case others would be interested
  • To find people to collaborate with on your projects (or at least get feedback on them)
  • To find people who understand your weird topical humor
  • To be exposed to views that you are not as familiar with

Generally, to connect with other people!

What does it mean to “join” a community?

  • Join the social mediums for the community (IRC/Matrix, mailing lists, etc)
  • Start contributing to projects

How do we make it easier for people to join a community?

  • Provide a good “onboarding experience”
  • Point them to where they should go to find everyone
  • Make it easy to find projects to contribute to / collaborate on
  • Pointing out easy starting points for contributing (easy issues, documentation, etc)
  • Promote a welcoming atmosphere so that someone doesn’t lurk for a long time before joining
  • Members of the community actively helping new people will help them decide to stick around
  • Organizing events like code jams, game jams, etc might attract new people and help them join
  • Being open-minded and not too tied to the commonly used tools or ideas

Why stay in a community long term?

  • Friendships or collaborators
  • You believe in the principles or mission, shared vision
  • It’s fun!
  • You enjoy helping people there
  • You get a lot of value out of the projects or communication
  • You continue to learn while participating
  • To see others grow as well

What value does a community provide for us?

  • Gives purpose
  • Learning
  • An outlet for creativity or motivation
  • A way to meet new people, especially collaborators
  • To learn best practices that you would not have figured out yourself

How does a community give its members a feeling of shared ownership?

  • Asking for and listening to their feedback
  • Encouraging them to contribute to projects (code, websites, content, artwork, etc)
  • Having a “democratic” process for accepting and deciding on anyone’s ideas
  • “Promoting” long-time members to also help with bigger things
  • Giving them a place to thrive

What do we want to accomplish together?

  • Make it easier for new people to get started with Emacs and Guix (tutorials, Crafted Emacs, Crafted Guix, etc)
  • Help people learn how to program (even if it’s just Emacs Lisp)
  • Build the most well-organized learning resource for the tools we use plus the wider sphere of using Linux and free software tools
  • Empower people to take ownership of their computing environment
  • Create a bunch of useful Emacs packages, Guix packages/services, and other cool tools for others to use

Examples of great communities?

What is great? Friendly, effective, organized, fun, a pleasure to be a part of

  • Debian: super well organized, effective
  • Doom Emacs
  • nushell
  • Guix
  • OCaml
  • Neovim
  • Gentoo
  • Clojure
  • Many functional programming communities
  • Julia Lang
  • ziglang
  • SerenityOS
  • golang
  • Spritely
  • Elixir
  • plaintextaccounting
  • Stardew Valley on Reddit
  • Fitness communities on reddit
  • DIY mechanical keyboard communities