I’m Rosie Sherry, I build communities and I'm the founder of Rosieland. AMA 🔥

@maria_kono There's many things at play here. Tools like Savannah (https://savannahhq.com/), Burb (https://burb.co/) and Common Room (https://www.commonroom.io/) make it easier to track community data. They are all new to the market and I'm sure they will evolve over time. I think data from these tools can partially help prove our worth, but we also have to be careful about not obsessing purely with the data. The more we can prove that growth, success, ideas, innovation, relationships, conversations, etc stem from community then the more people will actually see the huge benefits of community. Though I think we need to figure this out better. I feel like there is so much waste in community. So much value that happens in the relationships and conversations that goes unnoticed. The more we can work with this kind of stuff, be creative around it, find ways to collaboratively work with members and other team mates to make stuff happen, then this is where change happens. And ultimately, we want change, not necessarily vanity metrics on the number of conversations or upvotes. We have to believe in community: having to constantly justify ourselves is unhealthy for everyone. I don't think most people truly believe in community, if they did they wouldn't make it the first thing they cut. Business don't practice what they preach: and it comes across in their actions. For example, when ROI is calculated, despite community being 'people powered' all the talk is about ROI for the business and totally excluding how they give back to the people, industry and ecosystem. (https://village.rosie.land/t/cal...) Community is not marketing: but perhaps we can massively reduced the marketing spend by focusing on community. I certainly built my business with zero ad spend and with a pure focus on helping and serving the community. It is possible, we need to create more examples of it.

@frankie_zhang People don't understand how hard community is. Ask yourself: - why would they go back? - is it worth their time? - Is what exists inside helpful? - what are you doing to build up their habits of coming back? - how are you investing into growth? I find that a lot of communities are just not very interesting or helpful. Often they have *too much conversation and not enough action*. Conversations are key to community, but you have to find ways to make it into something more. No one wants to go to their 'local town hall' and be forever discussing things, they want outcomes and change. It's really hard. ❤️

@shuaib_safeer1 Twitter DM, LinkedIn, contact form on my website - https://rosie.land

@gusev honestly, there is so much on https://rosie.land, I'd start there :)

@tanya_janca I just don't think it's worth measuring ROI. I'm still developing thoughts around this, but it feels so unhealthy, you just can't measure community effectively. I feel disheartened by it all. It's probably better to focus on the positive outcomes that the community creates and to not let marketing/sales take all the credit for the community work that has been done. To get better at this I think community people need to get better at showing their work. Taking credit where credit is due. The positive feedback. The (word of mouth) recommendations. The back channel conversations. The inbound SEO. The innovation. The research we do and pass back to the company. Marketing would kill for the insights community can get. And community. needs to get better at passing back those insights to those that matter.

@vivek_vardhan 1. How to engage the community without being noisy? Esp when the community is made up of professionals like founders & CEOs? Don't be noisy? Focus on being relevant. Saving them time. Bring them new insights and different perspectives. Help them achieve what they want to achieve. 2. Any tools you recommend for good community engagement? Honestly, good conversation and community discovery. There are no tools for this, only your mind and creativity. 3. How do you manage hours to shut down PC and mobile notification as a community manager esp when it is a global community? Create boundaries and live by them. We all need them. Community builders are so prone to burnout because of this. We have to get better at creating boundaries. And honestly, your members will appreciate and understand. Fast responses are not necessarily better ones.

@simon_s_j I honestly struggle with questions like this. It feels like too much to bite off in one chunk. Partly the language thing is so complex 🤯 Another part is that I don't have direct experience with different language communities. I'm sure there are (enterprise) tools out there that cater for this (and likely cost a lot of money), but that's not something I directly know about. Another part is that I'm a sucker for the Minimum Viable Community approach. I've only ever been able to build community slowly, tackling one thing at a time, and often these things don't actually rely on a 'community tool', it's more about figuring out what people want. I'd go where your people are, embrace conversations that are happening, start something low risk, don't assume you know what they want and aim to build with their input. https://rosie.land/posts/a-guide...

@bethanavel I love this. I'd definitely go there and rant about tech bro and lack of diversity anonymously, I'm too scared to share my thoughts and experiences openly. 😅 Facebook groups has an anonymous feature and I've seen it work really well. It's scary talking real. People like to think we can be open, but often we can't. There is often a lot at risk, or we need that confidence to find ways to talk about things. Especially as a woman in tech, often I think it's all in my head (when it's not really, it's the self doubt creeping in). Personally, I'd embrace the fact that it is anonymous and the strengths that it gives you. Also to be frank, people are probably tired of networking these days. We're tired and have had too much of it and they are so hit and miss with value. The power of anonymity is that you could potentially have many interesting and spicy stories to share. I'd personally look at tapping into that and see how you can share them to a wider audience.

@dismore Support communities without selling! It's amazing how many companies insist of starting their own community (and spending lots of time and money on it), but they don't consider the option of being a good supporter of what exists out there. The biggest problem it the transactional nature of support, companies are always seeking the immediate returns and this pushes them down the path of spammy and unhelpful content. The more people can show up just to help people, the better off communities will be. The more companies can show up with financial support to these communities, the more these spaces can grow into something even better. People who run communities should be respected and compensated too, often they fail because people burn out from doing 'free' work. It's totally worth approaching the people who lead these communities and asking 'how can we help?'

@rosiesherry Thanks!

@automatedtester Community is a team effort, I think it would be really hard to build an authentic community without the engineering expertise. The best communities are founded and started by the experts and I think it's a big reason communities start to fail, we need those 'passionate' experts to keep driving communities forward. However, the amount of 'operations' required to run a community often goes unnoticed, there's probably a lot of day to day community admin stuff that could be allocated to a community manager rather than an engineer. That would at least start to free up some of their time to perhaps work on more valuable or impactful things. And what should they avoid? Mostly being wasteful and vanity metrics (and in contrast focus on solving problems and being creative/refreshing in the work being done).