About Mary Thengvall

Mary Thengvall is a connector of people at heart, both personally and professionally. She loves digging into the strategy of how to build and foster developer communities and has been doing so for over 10 years. After building community programs at O’Reilly Media, Chef Software, and SparkPost, she’s now consulting for companies looking to build out a Developer Relations strategy. In addition to her work, she's known for being "the one with the dog," thanks to her ever-present medical alert service dog Ember. She's the author of the first book on Developer Relations: The Business Value of Developer Relations (© 2018, Apress).

Mary is founder and co-host of Community Pulse, a podcast for Developer Relations professionals. She curates DevRel Weekly, a weekly newsletter that brings you a curated list of articles, job postings, and events every Thursday. She's also a founding member and "Benevolent Queen" of the DevRel Collective Slack team.

Mary is also a member of Prompt, a non-profit that encourages people to openly talk about mental illness in tech. She speaks at various conferences and events about building and fostering technical communities as well as how to prevent burnout in yourself and your team.

Links Referenced

• Twitter: @mary_grace
• Blog/Website: marygrace.community (or marythengvall.com)
• Biz Website: persea-consulting.com
• Newsletter: devrelweekly.com
• Podcast: communitypulse.io

Transcript

Mike: This is the Real World DevOps Podcast, and I'm your host, Mike Julian. I'm setting out to meet the most interesting people doing awesome work in the world of DevOps. From the creators of your favorite tools, to the organizers of amazing conferences. From the authors of great books to fantastic public speakers, I want to introduce you to the most interesting people I can find.

This episode is sponsored by the lovely folks at InfluxData. If you're listening to this podcast, you're probably also interested in better monitoring tools, and that's where Influx comes in. Personally, I'm a huge fan of their products, and I often recommend them to my own clients. You're probably familiar with their time series database, InfluxDB, but you may not be as familiar with their other tools, Telegraf for metrics collection from systems, Chronograf for visualization, and Kapacitor for real-time streaming. All of these are available as open-source, and as a hosted SaaS solution. You can check all of it out at Influxdata.com. My thanks to InfluxData for helping make this podcast possible.

Hi, folks, I'm Mike Julian your host of Real World DevOps Podcast. My guest this week is Mary Thengvall, she's a long-time builder of communities for companies like O'Reilly Media, and Chef. And author of the book on developer relations, The Business Value of Developer Relations, and runs a podcast, and newsletter of her own. Now she's helping companies create community-building strategy through a new consulting firm, Persea Consulting. Welcome to the show.

Mary: Thanks for having me, Mike, I appreciate it.

Mike: So, I want to start off with a really foundational topic.

Mary: Sure.

Mike: What is community in this context?

Mary: Absolutely. You start there, and I start there, they're most of my talks as well, just because I like to make sure that people have a shared definition. The definition that I always go back to with community is, and it relates to developer relations as well. But community for me is a group of people, who not only share common principles, but also develop and share practices that help individuals in the group thrive. So it's not just, "Hey, we're all on this platform." It's, "We're all on this platform, we have a specific goal in mind, and we're all helping each other."

Mike: Okay. A lot of us are pretty familiar with like the Python community, the Ruby community, or the Chef community, and then there's kind of the non-tech stuff. Like people that go to church, have a church community. Or we have the community of our neighborhoods. Are these the same community?

Mary: They have similarities.

Mike: Okay.

Mary: And it's that idea of, if you're in the Python community and someone reaches out on Twitter, or in a Slack team, or at PyCon for instance, which just happened. And they say, "Hey, I need help with these things." You'll likely find other people around you who go, "Oh, I know how to do that. Let me help. I'm more than willing to." In neighborhoods, you have things like next door, where someone will post, "Hey, I lost my cat." Or, "I need help with my garden." Or, "Help me out in these other areas." And people will jump in and say, "Oh, yeah, I'm more than willing to help out."

In those ways they can be very similar. There's obviously nuances with really just communities with technical communities, with neighborhood communities. And in some cases, they come together easier than others. Neighborhoods have the advantage of being in the same physical location, which is always really nice. Technical communities usually have forums around a particular product, or we use Twitter hashtags to kind of see what other people are talking about. And there's a big difference to me between communities of people, and community platforms.

And I know we have a lot to cover today, so I won't spend too much time on this, but just kind of a TLDR. The platforms are usually ways to bring people together to accomplish a specific purpose. A Python community platform for instance, you could have one for new Python developers, you could have one for experienced Python developers. You could have one for people who are willing to mentor folks, or people who are into Django, or whatever this specific piece of Python lore that you're interested in.

Mike: When you're talking about these platforms, are you talking about the medium on which they operate, or are you talking about kind of segmentations of that community?

Mary: A little bit of both, and those tend to go hand-in-hand. As you kind of see communities, larger communities, people who are interested in the same topics segmenting off, you'll often find software platforms that spring up that, you know, cool, the newbie Python people are hanging out on Twitter. The experienced Python people have a back channel slack team. The people, who are willing to mentor are on LinkedIn. So they're using already existing platforms to facilitate conversations around particular topics.

Mike: That seems like a bad thing.

Mary: It can be. The hard thing about that is, if there's not a specific person that's really taking the time to lead those groups or manage those groups, or build those groups of communities, that things can devolve fairly quickly with Twitter as we've seen. Or with Reddit or places like that where it's just not... It's hard to control when you don't own the platform, or when you don't own the conversations. But at the same time if you're not, owning the conversation as a company, then you aren't necessarily limiting people to what your viewpoint is. You're allowing people to talk and explore, a...