Building and growing the community

Takeaways

I was meant to give this with Njoki Kiarie. Her visa never came through, so I gave it alone. That is not an aside, it is half the argument of the talk.

Watch the talk

What a community is and why bother

In programming we say community casually. I belong to this one, I belong to that one. Where I come from it lands differently, because we are born into communities. So when I use the word in this talk I keep reaching for how it works at home.

A community is a group of people with something in common. Interests, values, goals. Once you belong to one, anything said for or against it lands somewhere inside you and you want to defend it.

Then the product manager question. Why. Why do we need communities at all? Because communities decide whether a language succeeds or fails. I do not think a language grows without one.

How Elixir Kenya actually grew

2018: five people who already knew each other

The idea came out of a Ruby conference in Kenya, which is where most Elixir stories seem to start. A few of us had heard about this language and in October 2018 we made a WhatsApp group.

Early on, everything is easy. Everyone is excited, everyone is learning. Call a meetup and everyone turns up, because it is new. Nobody is job hunting, because nobody invests career time in something with no visible future. We had full-time jobs in Ruby and JavaScript and asked questions without worrying about looking foolish. Our resources were two books, Dave Thomas and Saša Jurić, worked through at the same time, plus the docs.

The wrapper that was really a marketing decision

Eventually we had read enough and met enough. The book projects came with step-by-step instructions. We wanted to think one through ourselves. So the question became what to build and the first thing we asked was what would pull more people in.

We wrapped the API of a company that sends SMS, in Elixir. That company loves developers and reliably tweets and retweets what developers build on it. That is exactly what happened and members started arriving.

It also had a second effect I did not plan. The company got interested in Elixir. They were on Scala and we started having what-if conversations with them.

Three years in, three different communities in one room

By then the group had split into three groups of people who need different things. The curious, who wonder whether Elixir could be something. The convinced, who are learning. And the ones already being paid to write it, who now know it can pay.

That is the hard stage. It is also when we got brave enough to start reaching outside our own circle for speakers.

Water, porridge and a place to sleep

When I was growing up, people walked between places. There was often no regular transport and walking was faster. It was normal to walk into a house, say hello, be given water, drink some porridge and sleep there before carrying on the next morning. Nobody assumed you were there to cause harm. Everyone was welcome.

So when the community had people spread across every skill level, the question I asked was that one. How do we give these people water. Where do they sleep on the way.

In practice it is unglamorous:

Someone asked how long you keep doing this. The answer is long enough. Established languages get to a point where you can learn them from inception, find the jobs, find the resources and never need to meet a single member. Elixir is not there. It still needs people to be the human face.

The current shape of it

Meetups every Monday. The one that had just finished before Berlin was on Phoenix LiveView. Monthly webinars with a guest, usually external now that we have the nerve to ask, occasionally internal. Open source projects kept alive so that a new member always has something to pick up and an experienced one has something to do.

Then annually, ElixirConf Africa, which we had been running virtually since 2018. For 2024 we were planning to hold it physically in Kenya for the first time and package it as ElixirConf Safari, so that the technical part comes with an experience attached.

Why any of this needs you to travel

I ended on the thing that made this a solo talk. Njoki was supposed to be next to me. She had heard nothing back from the German consulate. I got a visa; she did not.

I pulled up a flight tracker a few minutes before going on stage and showed the map. Look at where the flights are dense and where they are not. Some people can move and some cannot. That is not a matter of effort.

So the ask was straightforward. Some of our members genuinely wanted to be at that conference and could not be, because passports and visas are refused over and over. They cannot get out. You can get in. Come to them instead. Bring your story and your experience, which is all they actually need from you.

The question afterwards

Someone asked what keeps me going, given that community work gives back less than you put in.

It is a fair question and yes, you do reach the point of wondering whether any of it is relevant. Most members are around while they are learning or job hunting and then they disappear. Sustaining that is hard.

What I get from it is not financial. I like training. Moving somebody from not knowing a thing to knowing it is the part I enjoy and that is most of the answer.