Communities Are Made Of People with Jono Bacon

Matty talks with Jono Bacon, author of the book People Powered: How Communities Can Supercharge Your Business, Brand, and Teams, and a consultant, author, advisor and speaker on community and collaboration. Jono got into Linux in 1998, which is where Jono discovered communities, and has worked at Canonical, GitHub and XPRIZE. Jono's view is that healthy communities improve the human condition, and that people "don't want the newsletter anymore" but a relationship with the companies and projects they follow. The cold open is Jono on lawyers: "What's the best way of reducing risk? Doing nothing."

The Kid Who Walked Two Hours

The book opens with an email Jono got about six months into working at Canonical, from a kid in rural Africa with no computer at home. The kid earned money from chores in the village, walked about two hours to a town, bought an hour of internet at a cafe to contribute to Ubuntu, and walked two hours back. Jono says it showed what's possible when someone feels part of a bigger mission, and notes that Ubuntu is an ancient African word meaning humanity towards others.

Consumers, Champions and Collaborators

Jono defines a community as a group of people interconnected around a mission or an ethos, and says social media can play a role but isn't one by itself. Jono breaks communities into three models. Consumers share a common interest, such as Star Trek fans or Kubernetes users, without much influence on the core thing. Champions go the extra mile with content, videos, blog posts and events, which add to a stockpile so the community gets more valuable. Collaborators come together to build something, either inner collaborators on exactly the same project, as in open source, or outer collaborators building things on top of your platform, like WordPress plugins or npm modules.

Across those models, personas have different needs. Jono's example is a company building a community for business decision makers who will never go to a forum and communicate by phone and email, alongside technical implementers who are used to forums, Slack and Stack Exchange. Defining the personas, including where they hang out, what motivates them and what they fear, makes the other decisions easier. Jono says you can't attract everyone at once, so you have to decide who is most critical.

Structured, Unstructured and Long-Term Memory

Jono splits communication into structured, such as a GitHub or GitLab issue or a Stack Overflow question, where there's no "how was your weekend," and unstructured, which is everything else. Unstructured platforms divide into short-term and long-term memory, a term Jono borrowed from Jeff Atwood. Slack and Mattermost are gratifying but transient, and "anyone who claims that they can do this is lying to you" about finding old discussions, so the same question gets answered repeatedly. Forums such as Discourse are easier to reuse, and Jono likes the Solved plugin, which lets you mark the 16th post as the answer and gets found on Google. Stack Exchange and Askbot, in contrast, "build value, but you don't build community." Matty says that the conversation around an answer has value too.

Finding and Enabling Champions

Jono agrees you can't create advocates, but you can facilitate them. The project has to be interesting, and people are motivated by dreaming big, so build a mission around what you're doing. Jono describes a member journey of casual members, then regulars, then core members, encouraged by incentives and mentoring. When someone's name keeps showing up, ask them to do things, without pressure. Jono's example is content: plan the tutorials, demos and events you'd like, then ask community members to write them with editing, guidance and promotion. "You just got to ask."

Matty wonders about legal and PR worries over outsiders contributing. Jono says it varies, startups are less anxious, and "lawyers are not incentivized to let things through. They're incentivized to reduce risk." Companies should tell the community, "you're not giving any control," but treating people more like equals and setting clear expectations about where the line is.

From Open Source Project to Project Inc.

Jono says a common mistake is tacitly agreeing to everything for fear of upsetting the community, when it's better to say where the line is. Jono puts it as "I'd rather piss you off now than piss you off in 6 months." Companies that do well build inclusive environments, with open issue tracking, open code and regular meetings, where engineers, product people and the CEO are members of the community too. Jono names HashiCorp, Docker, Microsoft, Red Hat and Mattermost, with Red Hat praised for training non-open-source staff in open source nuance. Matty adds a saying about the first rule of open source, that "no is temporary, yes is forever."

Measuring Community

Jono says to slice metrics by persona and avoid "data fetishism" dashboards with hundreds of graphs. For contributors, tangible metrics include pull requests submitted, time to first response, time to review and merge, and issue lifespans, and intangible ones, like whether people are happy and learning, are best tracked by community managers. Track the action and also its validation, such as a pull request being merged. Avoid counting repetition, like a forum ranking after 500 posts, which rewards repetitive posting. Pick 5 to 10 metrics and look at patterns on a regular cadence, asking whether a slowdown is summer or a new release.

Personas That Aren't You

For keeping up with personas unlike you, Jono's advice is to be organized, breaking a big list of tactics down by quarter, and to be intentional, talking regularly to the people involved. Jono would put a recurring open-ended meeting on the calendar with translators, for example, since "all of the answers to how to do this kind of stuff well live in your audience's brains." Surveys give some data, but a call gets more valuable answers, especially if you ask where you can make a bigger difference. Jono's last advice is to start simple and track a limited set of metrics for a limited set of personas.

• "Solved" plugin for Discourse - https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-solved-accepted-answer-plugin/30155
• Discount code for ADO listeners for $4 off Jono's book - https://www.amazon.com/gp/mpc/A2JVV0MPZUIQ7D