How to build a successful developer community

So i'm planning to start a developer community here in cameroon (africa). It will be basically about sharing experience, learning and making some events... also i'm planning to create free hackathon, trainings.

I will like to have some of your tips on how to build a great dev community, what to do, how to organize etc. ;)

Comments

[Ben Halpern]

• Be patient. It might take some time for it to take off, but don't rush it.
• Pay attention to the details. For example if you have speakers at your events, make sure they're prepared and cut them off when the time is up. Pay attention to little things like this and don't try to do too much at once.
• Have values and purpose and keep them as your guiding light.
• Have a code of conduct and don't let shitty behavior slide.
• Pay attention to how people are taking to things and constantly make little adjustments.
• Help people accomplish their goals.
• Keep your surface area manageable. A burnt out community manager is no good for anybody.

[Philly]

Yay, very well said! 🙌
Would be cool to print them on a poster or something to be reminded on a daily basis.

[Philly]

Hey Guiala, that really sounds like an exciting idea. 🙌 Do you plan on building a local community,
or rather a nationwide (online) community? Or a bit of both?

A while back ago I launched a local PyLadies chapter (a community of women (and men) who love the Python programming language). As Ben previously said, building a community (from scratch) can take some time, so patience in this case really is a virtue - def something I too had to learn along the way. 😄

We got started quite easily. When you figured out the basic points, you should just go ahead and spread the word! To become publicly visible, we started off with creating social media accounts - in our case this were mainly Twitter, GitHub and a self-hosted blog. This way we could easily connect with prospective members & companies (that e.g. would want to get involved with sponsoring future events), facilitate interactions, collect valuable feedback, and create some relevant content to show off our goals, ideas & code of conduct, and so forth.

After building a small but trusted online community, we took the whole thing offline and connected with all the people in real life by creating a meetup account and arranging events.

This may not be the way that's taught (like when googling), but it worked well for us so far. 😊