In this in-person edition of This Week in Community, Rosie Sherry and Simon Tomes are joined in London by Andy Claremont. They explore a strange moment for community, with layoffs at familiar companies happening just as community is more widely talked about than ever, and how AI slop is pushing people towards smaller, high trust spaces and in-person gatherings. Rosie compares the hype around community to how test automation is talked about in quality engineering, which leads into whether community professionals are becoming more specialist, how to demonstrate business value, and why community now needs a second specialism alongside it.
The conversation then turns to business pivots at Glide and Tana, and Salesforce moving its Trailblazer Community to Slack. Andy describes the role of the community pain sponge, helping members through change with empathy and clean off ramps. They also discuss culling community debt, from possibly retiring a long-running forum to handing activities back to members, and close on the value of seasons and breaks, so community activities can pause with purpose rather than end.
Chapter timestamps
00:00 In Person Community Gathering
04:02 Community Layoffs and Industry Shifts
05:28 AI Impact on Community Trust
10:13 Comparing Community to Software Engineering
12:49 Evolving Into Community Specialists
15:36 Demonstrating Business Value and Metrics
18:01 Combining Community with Other Specialties
21:00 Aligning Community with Business Pivots
29:05 Being the Community Pain Sponge
39:50 Strategies for Culling Community Debt
43:58 Implementing Seasonality in Community Planning
51:13 In Person Episode Conclusion
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