Cyberspace and Meatspace: Better Together
We all have a gift; we all have a passion—it’s just about finding it and going into it. Being an asset to your family and community.
—Angela Bassett
As technology marches forward, more and more communities are not just going digital but becoming primarily digital. Given this, it is easy to think of in-person events and engagement as “nice to have” instead of essential. This is an enormous mistake.
While digital environments allow us to scale, they largely lack the presence and personality of in-person events and engagement. Working together in the same room builds relationships and trust and often results in more focused and efficient collaboration. If you ignore bringing your community together in-person in your strategy, you are missing out.
Here’s the deal though: events can be expensive and time-consuming. If you don’t manage them well, you will see large chunks of budget disappearing with little to show for it. We can unlock these benefits if we are strategic and focused in how we integrate in-person engagement into our overall strategy and ensure the digital and in-person realms are clearly connected.
CHARTING A REALISTIC EVENTS STRATEGY
When many of my clients start seeing some traction in their product or service, there is a temptation to start running their own events and conferences. Many organizations don’t realize how much work is involved in delivering a solid event, and this can result in poor quality, underresourced events, with limited value.
Just like a small child, a small company or community needs to learn to walk before it can run. This is illustrated by my Event Evolution Path:
Fig. 9.1: Event Evolution Path
Start by offering yourself as a guest speaker at meetups or conferences. This requires a limited level of investment, and gets you in front of an audience. Don’t make this a product or commercial pitch. Focus on sharing lessons learned that are of general interest to the audience. Practice, stay on time, and do a good job. This will get you invited to other events. Keep doing this at as many different-yet-relevant events and audiences as you can get in front of.
Now co-organize a small event (such as a meetup) with another organization. For example, the SCORECast film music community runs an annual meetup at the NAMM music show in Anaheim, California.1 Keep things simple and focus on high-quality content. Provide a few talks, some Q&A, and plenty of networking. Provide drinks and tasty (and mostly healthy) food. Advertise the event extensively in the area, put posters up, promote it on social media, and generate a great turnout. Rinse and repeat a few more times.
As your community grows, it is time to organize your own meetup. Repeat the approach in the previous phase, but bigger and better. Have more in-depth content, have solid (and preferably well-known) speakers, and better food, drinks, and networking. Free events can experience up to a 50 percent dropout rate, so go gangbusters in getting bums on seats.
Now move toward organizing a more in-depth, dedicated event that is coscheduled next to another conference (so people are in town already). As an example, I run the Community Leadership Summit next to a large open-source conference.2 This is where you will likely have many more attendees, multiple speakers and/or tracks, sponsors, exhibitors, and more. Again, focus extensively on promotion: events that fail haven’t been promoted enough (or are not interesting enough). Nail it on both counts.
Finally, the ultimate step is to organize your own dedicated event. At this point you should have a dependable audience and community that will be interested in attending. You have to make this a success: the reputation and attendance of the event will reflect on you, your reputation, and your community.
As a general rule, only proceed to each next step in the Event Evolution Path if you have completed the previous steps along the way. Part of the reason I designed the Event Evolution Path this way is to gradually build the skills, expertise, expectations, and knowledge of the bumps in the road. Don’t skip over phases: you simply open yourself and your community up to more risk that way.
Also, remember not every community will need to reach the dizzy heights of organizing a dedicated event. Different communities will have different aspirations for events, and that is fine.
Let’s now explore some different ways of engaging with communities in person.
PARTICIPATING IN AND SPEAKING AT CONFERENCES
As you build your community, you will need to get out to events to raise awareness, meet community members, develop partnerships and more.
Participating in these events can represent an enormous cost to an organization. It isn’t just the cost of the tickets and travel, it is also the time spent getting there, attending, getting home, and often recovering from the weird flu you picked up while there. Events also cause email and work to get backed up, so the week after the event there is the obligatory “digging out of my email” period. Good times (not).
When you evaluate which events to attend, judge them on (a) whether your target audience personas are there, (b) if they are of strategic benefit, and (c) the cost/benefit analysis of what you aim to accomplish. There should be a clear value outcome for joining. It should not be, “Well, we kind of need to be there.”
When you do settle on an event, you should focus on getting the maximum value out of it. Be sure to follow my Conference Checklist:
• Focus on speaking and content delivery. As a general rule, only attend events if you can speak there. This will provide an important opportunity to address an audience, and it will also lower your costs (as your ticket should be comped by the conference). If you can’t speak at a conference (e.g., your submission wasn’t picked), only attend conferences you can see direct value in.
• Plan meetings and local opportunities in advance. At least two weeks before the event you should take a look at the event, the keynotes, attendees, and companies and reach out to people of strategic interest to book meetings. People get busy at the show, so get them booked before you get there.
• Prioritize the hallway track. You want to maximize time with other attendees at the event. Don’t waste time in sessions unless they are necessary. Spend your time in the hallway, at the expo, at the social events, and other places where people congregate. This is where conversations spring up, not in rooms where people quietly watch a slide deck.
• Bring business and community overview cards. Always have something you can give someone when they are interested in talking more. At a minimum this should be your business card, but you should also produce some business card–sized cards that provide an overview of the community and the first three steps for getting involved. They will find this after the event mixed in with their business cards and it gives them the information they need to get started.
• Network extensively, especially at the social events. There is a misnomer that the evening events at conferences and meetups are primarily aimed for socializing and in some cases, getting rather drunk. As such, many people skip the evening events and focus on the daytime content.
• The evening events are where relationships are often formed. Sharing a mixture of work and personal discussion is how people break the ice, build trust, and seal the likelihood of another (more substantive) meeting. My business has been largely built on these relationships, forged in bars, restaurants, at lunches, and social events. Booze is not required, so don’t worry if you don’t drink.
• Divide and conquer. One problem I see all the time at conferences is when people who work for the same company spend large chunks of the day or evening huddled together. Break the clique and divide and conquer! If there are two of you at a conference and you spend most of your time together, you not only reduce the potential surface area you can cover for meeting people, but you also send a signal that engagement with you is off limits (as you are spending time together and not with others).
• After the event, follow up with further meetings. The major goal for any meeting is to continue the conversation at a later date if it was valuable for both parties. The problem is that many people get home from the event and forget to follow up, or lose the business card. When you get back, follow up while the conversation is fresh in your minds. Schedule more time with a call or in-person meeting, and ensure you go to the meeting with (a) a clear goal of what you want, and (b) a clear sense of what you can offer.
BUILDING SKILLS AND TRAINING
You, your community, and your organization are only as good as the skills that power them. You should always focus on building skills and capabilities in yourself, your team, and your community members. The broader the skills base, the greater capabilities your community will have to produce value.
There is a rich mine of material ripe for training your community such as marketing/advocacy methods, how to use different products/infrastructure, how to organize events/meetups, leadership training, conflict resolution, and more.
I prefer two different approaches both of which mitigate the boredom often associated with training: digital training and training workshops. Let’s look at each.
Method 1: Digital Training
This is training that takes place online. Schedule it as a one-hour webinar that people can register for to learn a specific topic or skill. Importantly, schedule this for a time that makes sense for your target audience. If this is a global audience, early morning Pacific American time is usually a good time (it captures most of the US and Europe).
CasinoCoin holds regular community Q&A and roadmap sessions.3 I have delivered training videos on topics such as handling difficult people and avoidable career mistakes.4 Adobe delivers Photoshop “Magic Minute” videos with quick tips and tricks.5 There are many creative ways to deliver education in an interesting way.
Spend the first three quarters of the session performing the training. Throughout the session, provide a place where people can ask questions. As you run through the training, answer questions if they make sense in context. Try not to just display slides. Provide demos and interactive examples where it makes sense. Then in the last fifteen minutes answer any remaining questions.
When the session is complete, make the recording available in your community (and promote it extensively to your community as an important cornerstone piece of content).
Method 2: Training Workshops
When running in-person training be sure to schedule it at a date, time, and location where your target audience is available. Training sessions coscheduled with conferences are a great fit. Keep the class fairly small; ideally less than thirty people.
When promoting your workshop, make it clear what specific benefits attendees will get out of it. What skills will they learn? How can they apply and use these skills?
Break the training session into a series of different individual classes that cover a key topic. Each class should last no longer than forty-five minutes to one hour.
Teach the fundamentals for ten to twenty minutes, and ensure the audience has a good understanding. Then break the audience into a series of small groups and give them a task that relates to the content and a set amount of time to complete it. For example, if providing social media training, ask them to come up with a sample social media campaign.
Ensure that they have enough time to accomplish the task comfortably. After the time wraps up, ask each group to share their findings with the rest of the training group. This provides a way for everyone to benefit from the ideas, network with other attendees, and keep the blood flowing.
RUNNING A COMMUNITY SUMMIT
When I was at Canonical, we used to run an event called the Ubuntu Developer Summit every six months, for nearly ten years.6 It attracted more than five hundred attendees each time and it took us to far flung places in Europe, the Americas, and beyond. It didn’t just become a place where we made decisions, but it became a place where people ate together, drank together, formed friendships, and consoled each other through tough times. This is where I discovered the value of organizing a main community summit at least once a year.
My recommended format is simple. Have a series of short morning keynotes (designed to be inspirational), but the bulk of the event is in-person round-table discussion sessions where attendees provide training, discuss ideas, and make plans. These summits can be a great mixture of tutorial content as well as planning for new initiatives and projects.
Each session has a clear goal: to either teach a specific skill or technique or to get a clear set of tasks or recommendations to be delivered in coming months. For example, for the latter, if one session is about producing a newsletter for the community, the session should end with a list of tasks for putting the newsletter plan into action.
I have found this format to work well with a number of clients and their events. It provides a way for the community to (a) be strategically involved in the community, (b) get aligned on projects, and (c) grow and develop skills and relationships. Let’s explore how we run one.
Step 1: Decide on a Structure
I am a big fan of short, sharp keynotes in the morning and the bulk of the event focused on practical discussion sessions. It keeps people active, involved, and participating. As such I recommend this structure:
• Mornings: Two to four keynotes that are fifteen minutes long (for delivering skills and education).
• Afternoons: Three to five discussion sessions that are forty-five minutes long, with a few thirty-minute breaks included.
• Evenings: At least one main social event and preferably a few more informal social events.
Start with an opening keynote on the first morning that explains the goals of the event, logistics, and provides some Q&A. Conclude the event with a summary of decisions made throughout the sessions so everyone can leave with a clear sense of next steps.
Step 2. Finalize Attendees and Content
The success of summits is dependent on productive, constructive discussions and next steps. This is fueled by having the right combination of community members and people from your organization.
For your first event, keep it simple and small. Less than twenty people can provide enormous value. Make sure everyone who is invited has earned a place due to their active participation. You should only be inviting Regulars and Core members. Invite people who have already proven their value, not just people with opinions. Future events can be open to everyone and have a much bigger audience, but your first few events should focus on quality rather than quantity.
Don’t just make your decision on who to invite based on people you like. If someone adds value but they are often challenging you, your decisions, and your approach, they may be one of the most valuable participants. We don’t want an echo chamber. We want an environment that drives us forward with our eyes open.
If you invite key community members to join, they are taking time from their schedules and jobs to participate. As such, cover their expenses. You don’t need to be extravagant. Many sponsorships cover economy air, a reasonable daily stipend, and have people share rooms (if appropriate) in a budget hotel.
Now, invite people to submit topics for discussion, taking this approach:
1. Publicize the target themes of the next year. People need guardrails to ensure the sessions they submit are relevant to where the community and/or product/service is focused. Three months before the event, publish a blog post summarizing your ideas for Big Rocks and key target themes for the next year. This provides some important context for what people should submit session ideas on.
2. Provide a place where people can submit session ideas. This could be as simple as a form, or as complex as a paper submission system. Make sure you clarify that these are working discussion sessions, not presentations like a typical conference. Provide at least three weeks for submissions.
The kind of sessions you want to have should be focused on developing new skills and new initiatives and projects. For example, this could include adding new features to the community, starting new teams, refining leadership boards, optimizing on-ramps, refining incentives, running new competitions, improving diversity, and running local events. Anything we have discussed in this book would make great fodder for sessions.
3. Select sessions and send guidance. Select sessions that will offer the most value in the summit and meet the overall goals of the event. Publish the schedule so everyone in the community can see what will be discussed.
Send guidance for how session leaders should prepare for and run their session. I recommend you use my Summit Session Structure as shown in figure 9.2:
Fig. 9.2: Summit Session Structure
The number one goal to emphasize is that we want to get to tangible next steps. The goal of the event is to have clarity on not just what work is going to happen, but who is doing it and when it should be done by. The final fifteen minutes are designed to capture these actions.
Not all sessions will accomplish this, and we shouldn’t be too hard on community members if they don’t. We should, though, set these next steps as a standard goal for sessions.
Ideally, these actions should be captured on a public website (such as a wiki) so those not at the event can follow along. When the event is completed, you can then take these actions and provide any additional support to community members as they work on them (or even incorporate them in your Quarterly Delivery Plan).
Step 3. Run the Event
The major risk of any sprint is a lot of ideation and talk and no concrete action. As you facilitate your event, encourage people to make the most out of the time together. Have key decisions and debates, explore new ideas, but really focus everyone on action. You want people to leave the sprint with a sense of accomplishment and substance.
If possible, try to allow people who cannot join the event to dial in. This opens the event up to your broader community and makes it more inclusive. Where possible, provide three key services (in order of priority):
1. Provide a live stream so that people can listen in from outside the event. This may be a conference call or a video stream. Ensure these streams are linked from the schedule so people can join easily.
2. Provide a real-time chat channel that all attendees inside and outside the conference can join. For each discussion session room, create a different chat channel people can join to interact with the session as they listen to it.
3. Have a projector that displays the chat channel for that session room. This provides a way for attendees to see if someone from outside the conference has a contribution to the discussion.
This blend of in-person and remote participation provides a great way to harness face-to-face communication and makes it accessible to everyone, including those online.
As the event wraps, have a closing party where attendees can celebrate all the work invested together, have fun, and blow off some steam. One approach we used at every Ubuntu Developer Summit was to put together a live band, where any attendee was welcome to join and play songs together.7 It helped solidify lasting friendships and camaraderie. Also, who doesn’t want to play “Freebird” with their friends?
Step 4. Follow Through after the Event
Here’s the critical point: everyone invested a lot of time in the event, so make it stick. Review all the plans made and ensure that you follow up with people who committed to work to deliver on it.
Follow through on the decisions made, provide updates on progress, and break down problems and blockers.
These events are only useful if the community makes plans they can deliver on. Not everything will get done, but the majority of the agreed work should be executed. This is not just important to ensure the event was worth everyone’s time but also to ensure that the event itself adds value to the community.
A FOCUS ON FUSION
Some of the best things in life are the result of fusion: French and Thai food, jazz and metal music, Shakespearian tales with a Quentin Tarantino twist—they are all interesting. Sometimes fusion works and sometimes it doesn’t; it requires experimentation.
The in-person and digital realms benefit from fusion, but this requires similar experimentation. Try new ideas. How can you better hook your events into your digital community? How can your broader community play a role in live events? How can you refine how your sessions are run? How can you better support your session leaders and keynotes?
Fortunately, technology makes this easier and easier as time passes, but it depends on you as a leader to drive this experimentation.