The professional community plays a crucial role in the development of our industry. During Socrates Canaries 2023 (Socracan), we hosted a discussion on what constitutes a healthy community. What are the values of the community we want, what are the various actors involved and what’s their expected contribution.
In the software crafters movement, the community is key. That is the main reason why Socrates Conference started, in the first place.
According to the dictionary, the community are people considered as a unit because of their common interests, or social group. As a software developer, my community is composed of IT professionals. Within my community, I distinguish three main groups: software crafters, agilists and technologists. Agilists and software crafters could be the same group, there is certainly a lot of overlap between them, but the first group is leaning towards management and non-software related activities, whilst the second is centered on software development and the people crafting it. On the other hand, I consider technologists the people who fall in love with programming languages and tools, often passionate about the most modern technologies available. The community may be just local, national or international. I like to think of the software crafters community as an international community, striving to develop better tools for humanity.
The community is not owned by a single individual or entity. In fact, there is no owner. There is no boss. There are leaders, freely chosen by community members, without any official credential or role as leader. A community member is a person who cares about other community members and participate in community activities. There is no official community member certificate. There may be associations, entities with legal representation and some member fee, but that is a subgroup of the broader community. Associations are useful and necessary to handle invoices for certain activities, to pay for a venue, to buy stuff, to pay for professional services… What we love about the associations supporting communities is that they are altruist and lack commercial interest. Often, the people taking care of the association are generous and responsible stewards for the community.
It is common to mistake the community for a particular event. Events such as meetups or conferences are just one concrete activity hosted by the community. The community goes beyond one particular event. SoCraTes is not the software crafters community, but a gathering, an expression of the community. The fact that some event operates with certain rules, does not mean the same rules apply to other forums.
Community’s number one enemy is the ego. Bloated egos, often coming from people/organisations greedy for recognition and compliments. Whenever there is somebody or some entity wanting to own the community, there is a problem. Even in the case of community events organised by a particular person, company, or association, there is no owner or boss. The organisers take care of the community, not control of it. The role of the organisers is to facilitate, to help co-create the conditions for the good interactions to happen.
— “Wait a minute, but you are talking about community from a corporate blog, is this not counterintuitive?”
From my point of view, organisations are an important part of the community. Companies like ours:
Businesses have an enormous potential to support the community.
On the other hand, businesses benefit from their participation in the community, in many ways:
During Socracan, we agreed that not every business should be part of the community, and not all attitudes are welcome. We don’t like it when businesses goals are:
Tony Bruce suggested that, in the case of community events, there could be a code of sponsorship, so that companies are truly supportive rather than manipulative.
The picture above contains some of the ideas that came out of our brainstorming/discussion session:
I am very grateful to all the people who participated in this great session. If you were there and have pictures of the group or more ideas, please send them to us and we will update this article.
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