Welcoming people into the Magento community

Sonja Riesterer recently wrote a piece called An open, approachable Magento Community: Are we as open and welcoming as we should be?

She talked about how she spent some time at the Meet Magento Romania event connecting with a lot of great friends from the community, and had a great time with them.

But she also struggled with the fact that sometimes once we are in the in-crowd — the event speakers, the active Twitter users, the Stack Exchange heroes, the open source contributors…the popular ones — we don’t always reach out to new people as much as we should.

This is also something that I’ve heard Karen Baker talk a lot about over the years — she asks “what about the new developer just starting out?” — how can we have an onramp for them to build a business the way that some of the early Magento extension developers did?

There are so many additional barriers to entry now — how can we eliminate the unnecessary ones to ultimately help people and speed innovation?

It’s also something I’ve been thinking about in the context of Commerce Hero — perhaps having some sort of Rising Talent or New & Noteworthy section where we can highlight new community members and help them to connect with others, show their work, and establish themselves in the community.

I was talking with my friend Ben Tseitlin the other day about an idea he had around community management for businesses, and it was along a very similar vein to the pain point that Sonja was touching on with her article. That’s part of what made me want to write this article.

Ben has been looking at options for community management systems for the business that he works on with Dhru Purohit — which has mostly meant looking into forums software and social networking software like Ning — but it feels like there is a category in between the options that are available that needs to come into existence.

After having done quite a thorough search, they’ve opted for Facebook Groups. There are some very expensive options out there but for a business that might want to spend somewhere in the $100 to $500 /month range, there really isn’t anything that fits their needs.

Facebook Groups has some great features and a lot of people use it but it doesn’t scale well as you get into the thousands of members and also makes it hard to drive conversation in a productive way and help to really achieve their end-goal of creating a thriving community, by doing things like:

• focusing the conversation on certain topics
• highlighting certain conversations or threads
• highlighting new community members

One of the reasons Ben and Dhru are thinking so much about this is because community has been a huge part of the success of businesses that Dhru has been involved in. Bringing together people is a part of Dhru’s DNA.

When you’re hanging out with him, and he has some other friends with him, he introduces you to them in a lengthy and genuine way. Not just a “Hey this is my friend Kalen” but “Hey this is Kalen, he’s done X, Y, and Z, and is really good at this and that, and is interested in this”. “This is Ben, he’s into X, Y, and Z..” — he doesn’t just introduce people — he makes genuine connections between people.

Ben said something as we were talking about the community software pain point that they have which really struck me:

The core of any thriving community really comes down to meeting new people.

I think he’s exactly right, and that’s where this ties back to Sonja’s article. While the default for human beings tends to be to get comfortable in small circles of friends, what makes for thriving and growing communities is a constant flow of new community members in a context where they feel welcomed and invited and able to contribute to the community.

What makes for thriving and growing communities is a constant flow of new community members in a context where they feel welcomed and invited and able to contribute to the community

(Side note: I think there’s a very interesting business opportunity here and Dhru and Ben’s business would be the perfect place to incubate it with them as customer zero — if you’re a full stack developer looking for an app to build, I’d highly recommend you get in touch with them.)

One of the other great points that Ben made was that software is not enough to solve this problem. And that if they were going to build a business around this pain point, it would likely be software combined with service — you would have to have a community manager moderating things, turning the dials and nobs on the software, and, like Dhru, being that person that genuinely loves to connect people and is effective at it.

When I saw the recommendations that Sonja gave to better welcome new people into the Magento community, what struck me was that they seemed like great ideas but that the ideas in and of themselves wouldn’t be enough — you would need a person driving those priorities — whether that’s someone involved with event organization or someone doing community management for a business.

I think of people like Sherrie Rohde — who I met years ago when we worked at Sweet Tooth together, and who introduced me to tons of people and really helped me to break into the community — and who is now doing an incredible job as the community manager for Magento.

One other idea that Fabio Ros shared with me recently that could help to solve this pain point is similar to what codementor.io does, which is allowing developers to pay for high-quality mentoring from more experienced developers.

Since we are building a great network of Magento developers, it might be a natural feature to offer. Perhaps codementor.io already has this market covered, but as with most things many times the magic is in the community that you attract to your service — so I’m not sure how strong their Magento community is.

The nice thing about this is that it offers a straight forward way for people to connect with more experienced developers that they respect. Many times people don’t know what special handshake they have to learn to get on the in-crowd’s radar. But offering a simple option for them to pay for someone’s time and at the same time establish a connection with them could be a great option.

Well, I’d love to hear what you think.

Agree/disagree? Tell me why!

Do you have any specific ideas for how this type of thing could be implemented with Commerce Hero? I’d love to hear them.