Matthew Revell

It's true, community isn't marketing. But we should adopt and adapt good ideas when they have the power to make us more effective.

In this talk I'll look at how both non-commercial and commercial developer communities can use some of those ideas from the world of marketing to create, implement, measure and report on a strategic plan that provides a clear path from newcomer to community leader. Not only that, I'll also show how to measure and then report that effectiveness to commercial sponsors and the community itself.

There are three great lessons we can borrow from our friends in the marketing world:

• Have a strategic plan.
• Measure, measure and measure again.
• It didn't happen unless you told someone.

It's true, community isn't marketing. But we should adopt and adapt good ideas when they have the power to make us more effective.

In this talk I'll look at how both non-commercial and commercial developer communities can use some of those ideas from the world of marketing to create, implement, measure and report on a strategic plan that provides a clear path from newcomer to community leader. Not only that, I'll also show how to measure and then report that effectiveness to commercial sponsors and the community itself.

If there's a FOSS community that you love and you want to see it become more effective, come and join me in the community dev room.

• We're sorry that this talk has been cancelled. *

I look at how to create a developer outreach strategy that is suitable for community-led projects and commercially led products, including:

• setting goals
• creating programmes
• segmentation: who are you speaking to?
• choosing the right mix of activities
• content marketing measurement.

You can eat and drink for free any night of the week in London. All you need are a meetup.com account and a tolerance for pizza.

In offices, co-working spaces and conference rooms across the city, groups of software developers are listening to talks, participating in workshops and hacking together. Taking time from their evenings, they’re investing in their careers, having fun and spending time with friends.

If you want to get their attention, you’ll need more than just a better set of pizza toppings.

Software developers have been sharing code, tools and ideas with each other ever since Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage gave their seminar about the Difference Engine at the University of Turin.

That sharing of ideas amongst peers is ingrained in hacker culture and it is how git, Docker, nodeJS and many other projects grew to massive adoption. Advocacy works because, usually, developers share only the tools that did a good job of solving a real world problem. In that context, traditional marketing can seem contrived and inauthentic.

The flipside, of course, is that even really great tools can go unnoticed.

In this talk, I’ll look at how to prepare for and create a developer outreach strategy that is suitable for community-led open projects or commercially led products that are aimed at developers. We’ll look at:

• setting goals
• creating programmes
• segmentation: who are you speaking to?
• choosing the right mix of activities
• content marketing
• measurement.

It sounds a bit like marketing right? Well, let’s keep this between just us, but it actually is marketing. It’s just a kind of marketing where we can choose to do the right thing.

(Please note that this talk replaces 'The Business of Community' by VM (Vicky) Brasseur.)