I will share what a community is, how to operate one, and what I have learned.
I graduated in 2014. In my first two years after graduation, my work was close to my major, ecology. But I felt the future was limited and wanted change. After some basic research, I decided to move to Beijing and enter the internet industry.
In April 2016, I moved from Jinan to Beijing and became a community operator at the twt community. At the end of January 2021, I left and joined QingCloud, becoming the operations manager for an open-source community (the KubeSphere community).
By now I have been in community operations for six years. I wrote some articles on my public account before, but rarely organized my experience into longer posts. Public-account posts also decay quickly, so I started a blog to write more durable pieces. The topics are not limited to work.
About communities#
When I first joined, I knew little about communities. With mentoring and self-study, I gradually gained a clear understanding.
A community has no strict definition. In this post, I refer to “online communities.” An online community is a platform that gathers users with shared traits and provides interactive services.
The two most important elements are users and content. Content can be produced by users or driven by operations. Users consume that content. The two reinforce each other and drive community development.
If I had to describe a community with keywords, I would think of: type or positioning, user groups, content direction, lifecycle stage, user scale, commercialization, and more.
Take Zhihu. You can call it a general Q&A and knowledge-sharing community. Users span industries, roles, and ages. Content is broad. A similar community abroad is Quora. IT communities like CSDN, SegmentFault, Juejin, and 51CTO are vertical communities focused on IT knowledge and practitioners.
The twt community and the KubeSphere community are both IT communities, but they differ. The twt community mainly serves operations engineers and covers cloud, databases, storage, networking, and big data. Its content and interaction include Q&A, articles, events, resources, and groups. The KubeSphere community serves developers, many of whom are users of KubeSphere, so most content and activity revolves around the product. The operations approaches also differ, as I will explain later.
About community operations#
Community operations means using methods to keep a community healthy and growing.
There are many methods, but they can be grouped into three: content operations, user operations, and event operations. My six years of work have centered on these three.
Content operations#
Content is the foundation of a community.
A healthy community has user-generated content, but quality and quantity vary and are often insufficient. Operators need methods to encourage production.
In the twt community, we used:
- Constantly discovering experts and incentivizing them to produce high-quality content (PGC)
- Hosting online Q&A events where Q&As themselves became content
- Setting incentives and honor systems so users could earn community points or appear on leaderboards
- Researching user needs and hosting targeted exchanges to solve those needs and generate content
The second and fourth look similar, but the fourth has more precise users and needs, and is easier to organize.
For KubeSphere, the methods are similar, with differences:
- Open-source collaboration brings more voluntary contributions
- The product team is also a major content source
- Offline events focus on sharing, with exchange as a supplement; online events are usually live sessions focused on a single topic with Q&A
User operations#
Users consume content. For operators, user growth is unavoidable.
Most communities can roughly divide users into ordinary and core users, with further segmentation like active users and contributors.
Operators acquire new users and then retain and activate them. In KubeSphere, typical methods include:
- Building user groups (usually WeChat groups) to reach users efficiently, collect feedback, and support product iteration and content output
- Building SIGs (special interest groups) around product areas like architecture, installation, and DevOps; SIG members are often enthusiasts or contributors
- Organizing events that empower community users
- Establishing community honor titles such as contributor, member, talented speaker, ambassador
Event operations#
I separate events because they are very important. Events produce content, grow users, and retain users.
Events take many forms. In IT circles, most focus on sharing: live talks, offline talks, articles, or resources, depending on format.
In the twt community, we used:
- Online Q&A events focused on a specific topic or product area (for example, installation Q&A)
- Online peer exchange events for a specific industry (insurance, banking, securities), with general or industry-specific topics
- Offline peer exchange events, with more emphasis on content sharing
- Offline training events with exams and certificates
- Online competitions in a technical domain, often longer-term
In KubeSphere, the two main event types are:
- Offline meetups for users in a city
- Online live streams, weekly, each on a different topic but within cloud native
I will keep exploring new formats to empower users in richer ways.
Due to length, I did not expand every topic here. My experience is limited, so this is not exhaustive and may be biased.
What I have gained from community operations#
Before moving to Beijing, someone told me my personality was not suitable for operations because it requires communication, and I am introverted.
But I persisted and grew in many ways:
- Broader perspective: the longer you work in a domain, the deeper your understanding
- Expression: constant communication strengthens your ability to express ideas
- Communication: as above
- Project execution: operations is often like project management
- Social skills: I have hosted dozens of offline events, sometimes with 150+ attendees
- Coordination: community work is complex and parallel, requiring strong coordination
- …
The biggest change is confidence in dealing with people. Years ago, a friend told me I looked completely different, full of confidence. I believe this came from the job.
Closing#
This post explains community operations based on my own experience. It is not professional or comprehensive, but I hope it helps. I will write another post about open-source community operations because participating in open source has been special and rewarding for me.
There is a comment system on this blog. You can log in with your GitHub account to leave a comment. I work in open-source community operations. I am far from an expert, but I would love to connect and discuss. My WeChat ID: zhaofawei26.