Building the Offline First Community
The idea for Offline Camp was born out of the desire to connect the community and bring folks together from different backgrounds to see how combining their skills could contribute to the future of Offline First. Offline Camp utilized an “unconference” style event format, which meant that campers proposed and voted on the most important topics to them. Out of this voting process, one of the first orders of business for camp was a session on formalizing ways to evangelize the community behind the Offline First approach.
TL;DR: One hour was not enough time to figure out how to formalize the Offline First community. Shocker! Well, not really… But we got a lot from the discussion!
There would be many advantages to formalizing the Offline First community, not the least of which being it would make it easier for folks to adopt Offline First practices into their development processes. As the builders of this community, we have the opportunity to help make new Offline First advocates by compiling the tools they will need to share the love with their communities. We can help folks by providing concrete tools to help sell Offline First to the stakeholders on their teams back home. Tools for building this community could include things like a GitHub org with sample apps, case studies, and a wiki, forming an organization for worldwide chapters on Meetup, and better utilizing offlinefirst.org. At a higher level, we decided that the future of the Offline First community hinges on helping the community build a business case for Offline First.
So how do we build a business case for Offline First? That’s a big problem to solve and the answer is different depending on which problem you’re looking to solve. But we can start by identifying which organizations have a big stake in the success of Offline First, such as: IBM, Google, Microsoft, Apache Software Foundation (including Apache Cordova and Apache CouchDB.) Organizations with the time and budget can help craft the Offline First community by providing case studies that prove the success of the approach through concrete analytics. These companies have the capital to dedicate time and energy to help support the organization and attendance of Offline First community events.
As an example, IBM Cloud Data Services was the foundational sponsor and event partner of Offline Camp. Our team has created several resources to help developers build Offline First apps including the Cloudant FoodTracker sample iOS app and tutorial (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3,) an open source CouchDB proxy to enable replication of database subsets, and we regularly participate in conference presentations and webinars. We have a number of other Offline First resources that can be found on the IBM Cloud Data Services Developer Center.
Companies invested in the future of Offline First can also help by spreading the word via social media, company blogs, and marketing. Most of all, we’ve got to ensure everybody with a stake gets a voice. The Offline First strategy needs teamwork from every stakeholder to succeed, so that as a community we can tackle the big issues like security and encryption, device limitations, design patterns (both engineering and UX,) offline maps, etc. To grow this community we need to convince new projects to adopt these practices.
One strategy for building this community could be fashioning it after the success of existing movements, like Progressive Web Apps and responsive web design. How did these ideals grow and become common place without becoming tied to a specific organization? It definitely took great ambassadors out there speaking at conferences and doing the work on the ground to prove the value. We also need folks out there helping to build connections to the less obvious parts of the industry that are also stakeholders in Offline First, like Internet of Things and native apps.
Truly, the future of the Offline First community hinges on the grassroots efforts of people (developers, designers, ops, CEOs) building a movement where great minds can come together to address the big issues at hand. From this session at Offline Camp a lot more discussions sprang forth… On day 2 of camp, we collected ideas around strategizing in-person Offline First events and had a full session on how to build offlinefirst.org into a useful community building tool. There were also impromptu discussions on the importance of a code of conduct, and the need to strategize for diversity.
Chat with the Offline First Community on Slack and join the conversation on building community in the #community channel. Keep watching Offline Camp on medium for more content recaps from camp including sessions on Alerts & Notifications, Security, APIs, UX Design Patterns, Tooling… and more.
Editor’s Note: This article is part of series of unconference session recaps submitted by the awesome folks who participated in our first ever Offline Camp, a unique tech retreat that brings together the Offline First community. You can find more coverage of our initial discussions in our Medium publication. To continue the conversation, join us at our next event or sign up for updates and cast your vote on where we should host future editions of Offline Camp.
