Building a Sustainable Developer Community of Practice
By: Kelly Churchill
Tags: Community, Leadership, Front End Development

Key: Empower Leaders Across A Distributed Community

In order for the FED@IBM community to sustain, the leadership of the program has begun to shift from a single, Austin-based leader to a distributed and scaleable model. In order for our community to continue to thrive, we created a hub-and-spoke model to connect the developers located all over the world, in many different time zones and cultures.

We brought together a group of thought leaders in our program from all over the world to an in-person workshop. We used design thinking to examine our mission and adjust it for the future. Our mission we evolved to:

FED@IBM helps IBM grow revenue by crafting industry leading user experiences grounded in a set of open practices and shared core competencies that attract, retain, and grow top talent

At the end of the in-person workshop, these thought leaders were charged with going back to their local regions to create a local, in-person “branch” of the global program. The first FED@IBM local branch was officially launched in February 2018 during a week-long enablement event that the local FED@IBM branch leaders in Böblingen, Germany, conducted. This event which combines conference-styled talks with a hackathon, is called Hackademy. Their event was delivered using a blueprint from the same event which was prototyped by Sam Richard and Damon and delivered by a core team at 16 live events. This event was packaged up as “Hackademy In A Box” with video and written resources and instructions for any local team to conduct their own event.

The key to the success for these local groups is the connection through the hub. Early on in the program, local groups were formed after a Hackademy event took place in a location as the Hackademy team moved on to the next location.

While there was great interest immediately following the conference/hackathon event, we found that over time interest waned and often these local groups did not survive. When we launched the official FED@IBM local branches earlier this year, we immediately set up a shared Slack channel for the branch leaders, GitHub repositories within the FED@IBM GitHub organization and scheduled regular branch leader calls. Maintaining this connection has been critical to allow support for branch leaders to share ideas on how to manage the local community or ideas for activities.

For example, one of the groups shared how they were struggling with attendance at their meetups and realized that members often forgot or had other meetings scheduled over it because the event wasn’t added to their calendar. One local branch leader shared their solution with the rest of the group (which was to leverage an internal event registration tool that automatically subscribes participants to the sessions and reserves time on their calendars) which drastically improved attendance. Now the rest of the groups are benefitting from this new way of managing their local meetups.

Key: Define the Group’s Role Within the Organization

As a community of practice matures, it must define its role in the broader organization. In order to become more than just a community of support and instead a vehicle for transformation, the community needs to find ways to measure its impact as well as prioritize what initiatives the group will focus on.

FED@IBM’s hub of branch leaders is currently brainstorming and ideating on the following areas of impact: onboarding new front-end developers, building and sustaining community, increasing internal awareness and increasing external eminence.

Areas of focus for onboarding center around things like the tools FEDs at IBM use, what defines a FED at IBM and what are some things to avoid. The group has defined guidelines for job postings and guidance for teams around how to interview and hire a front-end developer.

The focus of initiatives around building and sustaining community are around getting the word out about FED@IBM, rewarding participation, support running branches and rewarding presenters. Digital badges, swag, thanking the group leaders, and identifying their contributions to their managers are all potential ideas.

Increasing internal awareness is perhaps one of the most critical areas for the community to sustain. Attracting visibility and attention beyond word of mouth to continue to attract not only members whose job roles align 100% with the community but even those who spend even a small portion of their time coding the UI. Also, increasing internal awareness among engineering leadership is critical in the program’s longevity and infusion into engineering teams.

Finally, increasing external eminence is critical as well and can also be a vehicle for increasing internal awareness. Taking notice of how IBM Design and IBM’s Carbon Design System have leveraged this tactic, FED@IBM is also ramping up our efforts by sharing our program externally through external speaking engagements and thought leadership. Jessica Tremblay and Sam Richard shared the FED@IBM story at last year’s DevRel Summit in their talk Finding Community: Building FED@IBM while my closing keynote at the Mobile+Web Dev Summit in March 2017 and follow-up blog post, Lead the Change You Want to See at Work, focused on telling the story from another perspective.