DevRel Scribbles
  • What are Scribbles?
  • Index
  • Developer Advocacy
  • Developer Advocates
  • Life as a developer advocate
  • Modernising Red Hat’s enterprise developer program
  • Engaging 9-year-old software developers
  • Making 22-year-olds love 26-year-old software
  • Dogfooding developer products: gathering insights from internal hackathons
  • How far does your ethical responsibility stretch for the tech your devs create?
  • Outside the lecture theatre
  • How do you design programs for diversity?
  • Build the Platform Your Developers Actually Want
  • Measuring dev rel programs far beyond marketing activities
  • Developer Evangelism
    • Developer Evangelists
    • How to rock a technical keynote
    • The Art of Slide Design
    • The Art of Talk Design
    • The Art of Story Design
    • Dev events beyond 2021
  • Developer Experience
    • The Power of Content
    • Building a Developer Community in an Enterprise World
    • How to lose a dev in three ways
    • Developer relations, why is it needed?
    • The hierarchy of developer needs
    • GitHub is your documentation landing page
    • Docs as engineering
    • Commit messages vs. release notes
    • A11y pal(ly)- crafting universally good docs
    • Inspiring and empowering users to become great writers, and why that’s important
    • Solving internal technical documentation at Spotify
  • Community Management
    • Building community flywheels
    • DevRel = Community Management?
    • Creating high-quality communities
    • How to grow a healthy Open-Source community?
    • Managing communities at scale
    • Using community to drive growth
    • Useful community success metrics
    • Communities aren't funnels
    • How to mobilise your community during a pandemic
  • Managing a DevRel Team
    • Developer Relations + Product
    • Distributed developer relations
    • Understanding company goals
    • DevRel Qualified Leads (DQL)
    • Path to success for DevRel
    • How to move up in your organization
    • Four pillars of DevRel
    • Building your DevRel dream team
    • Managing the burnout burn-down
    • I messed up and I’m going to get fired
    • How to report on community relationships without being creepy about it
    • How to scale a developer relations team
  • Misc
    • Is developer relations right for you?
    • Tooling your way to a great DevRel Team
    • Planning your DevRel career
    • Success metrics as narratives
    • Get executive buy-in or else
    • Introduction to the AAARRRP devrel strategy framework
    • Strategy for developer outreach
    • Connecting dev rel and product
    • Performance DevRel
    • Ultimate cheat codes for healthier travel
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On this page
  • Summary
  • Scribbles
  • DevRel family tree
  • Connection with Open Source
  • DevRel and community do different things
  • Community without DevRel
  • DevRel without community
  • Community management ≠ DevRel

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  1. Community Management

DevRel = Community Management?

Developer relations and community management often look like two sides of the same coin, but taking a step back it becomes clear that they are distinct yet related.

PreviousBuilding community flywheelsNextCreating high-quality communities

Last updated 3 years ago

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Summary

  • DevRel and community management share many similarities.

  • When it comes to all three categories -- DX, DevRel and CM, the lines are blurred. There are roles and actions that can be performed by either or both. But it still makes sense of us to think of them as distinct practises.

  • DevRel of community management -- neither arrived fully formed.

  • DevRel and community management even though from the same root, have taken a different direction.

  • Difference between the two -- their end goals.

  • Community and community management is everywhere!

  • Genuine communities can be built even where there is no coding involved.

  • DevRel can too happen without any attempt at building or managing communities.

Scribbles

  • Developer Relations - DevRel

  • Developer Experience - DX

  • Community Management CM

  • How does one define the various roles/task under developer relations/experience and community management? -- Bands on a spectrum, the high school, em spectrum something like that.

  • Bands on the spectrum help us to understand their characteristics.

  • When it comes to all three categories -- DX, DevRel and CM, the lines are blurred. There are roles and actions that can be performed by either or both. But it still makes sense of us to think of them as distinct practises.

  • The diagram clearly helps in breaking any hierarchy, if at all. It helps in giving a clear-er approach from an implementation choice for an organization.

DevRel family tree

  • Wait! Wasn't it mentioned ⬆️ that there is no hierarchy? But now there is! Which can help us understand the interplay between developer relations and community management.

  • DevRel of community management -- neither arrived fully formed.

    • DevRel

      • Open source projects built awareness and attracted contributors with a mix of developer programs.

    • DX (Developer Experience)

      • Evolution of tech writing, User experience and more.

    • Community

      • Open source, PR, various forms of marketing and customer service.

Connection with Open Source

  • DevRel and community management even though from the same root, have taken a different direction.

  • In the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was rare for companies to involve themselves in open source.

  • Sun, Red Hat and Canonical are a few examples of open-source communities which borrowed methods from academia, special interest groups, and clubs, these were communities that developed their own ways to manage their development of software, attracting users and contributors.

  • Matthew (Author of the blog) thinks that it was Ubuntu's broader community focus was the point where community management and developer relations began to take separate paths.

  • Much of what everyone does in DevRel and community was pioneered by open-source communities.

DevRel and community do different things

  • Difference between the two -- their end goals.

  • DevRel

    • Building sustainable awareness, adoption, and community around developer-targeted products.

    • Community management is one of the techniques DevRel relies on.

  • CM

    • Creating and maintaining a process that enables people to comes together for a common goal.

Community without DevRel

  • Community and community management is everywhere!

  • Part of community management is called customer service, usually delivered through social media and forum software.

  • Genuine communities can be built even where there is no coding involved.

DevRel without community

  • DevRel can too happen without any attempt at building or managing communities.

Example

Take the example of the banks releasing open banking APIs. They have developer portals, many are starting to go out and talk at events, some publish content. Few, if any, are building genuine communities around their offerings. Perhaps within time some will have thriving communities but many will meet their goals without doing so.

Community management ≠ DevRel

  • Like it was mentioned earlier there is no hierarchy as such and both CM and DevRel can be essential in particular cases for growing a community of developers.

  • But they are not the same thing.

Is developer relations the same thing as community management?DeveloperRelations.com
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