Here's a little bit about the community team at Keen IO, so our community can get to know us better and understand why we exist and what we do. The text below was copy/pasted from the Keen Operating System - a private Github repo (set of documents) that we use at Keen to define our company's operational structure, organizational practices, etc. Every employee is a contributor to the repo.
Have ideas for us? Like, "Hey, it'd be super cool if the Keen team could do X, to support Y and Z aspects of the community." There's a repo for that :)
And now, on with the show!
#The Keen IO Community team ...is dedicated to ensuring that the community around our (Keen's) people, platform, and brand is the most loving & caring, welcoming & inclusive, helpful & fulfilling place it can be, on the internet and IRL.
##Team members
- Sarah-Jane Morris @sarahjanemorris
- Taylor Barnett @tbarn
- Tim Falls @timfalls
- Justin Johnson @elof
- Joe Wegner @josephwegner
More importantly than the team members: the community members. "Community" is difficult to define. It's somewhat intangible and could be imagined or perceived in different ways by different people. In order to better understand what commmunity is, it's helpful to identify who a community is.
###Who is the Keen community? Developers. Data scientists. Product managers. CTOs. API experts/enthusiasts. Open Source contributors. Entrepreneurs. Humans. Cats. Pugs.
People who are our customers, once were our customers, or could one day be our customers. People who work at Keen, or have worked at Keen, or will one day work at Keen. Our friends and family members are also members of our community. So are our investors and advisors and mentors - past, present, & future. Our partners and service providers are part of our community. They're people upon whom we depend and who often similarly depend upon us.
People who wear our t-shirts and put our stickers on their laptops. People who tell their friends "their API is great, and they really take care of their customers" or "they have a really cool culture; you should work there."
All these people, in the absence of the Keen community, could simply be a number of disconnected individuals. But in the presence of our community, they are people who all care about something in common. And through our community, they can feel connected, be inspired and inspire others, help one another design a data model or squash a bug in one's code, and create technology that helps a business serve its customers or a space robot take pictures on Mars.
#Team Mission We use our super powers to help Keen IO grow into a sustainable business, by supporting other teams within the organization (our internal community) in accomplishing their missions and helping our customers, partners, investors, advisors, fans, friends & family, etc (our external community) be everything they dream to be.
That might sound rather lofty and utopian and ambiguous - even to us it does. Guess that makes it all the more worth reading about why this is our fanciful undertaking and how we go about it.
##Why do we do this?
Our company is especially unique, in that we truly believe (and invest) in the power of community to build a thriving business. Our team is just one example of those investments. Our efforts forge relationships with people around the world. As a human race, we require relationships for survival (consider their contribution to "belongingness" and "esteem" within Maslow's hierarchy) and prosper proportionately to their strength. Businesses are no different than humans in this regard - we (Keen) rely upon relationships with people who can (and will) help us succeed as we meander down the road from startup to grownup.
While everyone in our company has personal and professional relationships that can and do help Keen in various ways, our team has been designed to focus on harnessing the karma we create for ourselves in the world, through our human interconnectedness, and turning it into goodness for our collective selves - our company.
Trust flourishes in the presence of relationships, and it withers in their absence. By establishing trust within our community, we empower its members to tell their friends about Keen, to rely on our platform/product, to agree to exchange their money for our services (customers) and/or our equity (investors), and even stick with us when the proverbial doody hits the proverbial fan.
Historical evidence, as well as current efforts, show a positive impact as a result of community-building at Keen, further and persistently solidifying our commitment to embedding community-mindedness at the core of what we do. Examples are helpful, right?
Anecdotally, Keen did not spend money on traditional marketing for its first few years in business; we did however invest in building community. Like that one time Kyle visited India as part of Geeks on a Plane in 2012; today we have 800+ signups from that country. Also, that trip built stronger between Keen and its current investors/advisors, future customers, and even future employees.
Since opening our public Community Slack channel, we've seen customers helping other customers and working together to solve each other's problems in a matter of seconds or minutes. This creates a great experience for all -- questions get answers, and our customer success specialists get to spend more time working on uniquely challenging, less routine issues.
Similar to the Slack example above, Twitter is another proven forum for developers helping other developers discover Keen IO and understand its value and capabilities.
##How do we do this? By showing the world, through deliberate actions and general good vibes, that we genuinely care about them and value their success as much as our own.
Ok, that's some abstract fluffy shit. How really do we do this?
###We exist and interact with people online 💻:
- Slack
- Github
- Open Source Projects
- SDKs
- Stack Overflow
- http://keen.io/community
- Developer Google Group
- coming soon:
###We also exist and interact with people offline🐾:
- Events that we create:
- Happy Data Hour
- Show & Tells (Open Source, Data Viz, other?)
- Startup Summer Day Camp
- Intro to Event Data & Analytics
- Data Science Office Hours
- Events that other people create...
- ...and at which we speak, sponsor, attend, participate, help...
- conferences
- meetups
- hackathons
- startup competitions, demo days
- office hours (accelerators, incubators, coworking spaces)
- educational workshops
- cultural events (arts, sciences, music, etc)
- ...and at which we speak, sponsor, attend, participate, help...
#Roles and Responsibilities
R-A-C-I stands for Responsible-Accountable-Consulted-Informed.
You can read more about it on wikipedia.
Our team's RACI lives right here.
##Know our role The special thing about community: everybody can do it!
The special thing about community at Keen: everybody does do it!
There's a lot of stuff listed above, indicating that the activities, social media channels, projects, associated content, etc. are under the purvey of the Community team. However, we can't and don't do any of this stuff on our own. We get help from everyone at the company -- because we need it, because people (like you) offer it, and because that's how community (at its best) works.
MOAR examples:
Happy Data Hours can and have been put on by folks from virtually ALL THE TEAMS and can even be organized by community members without our physical presence, using the playbook we've open sourced.
Intro to Event Data & Data Analytics workshops have been largely driven by members from the Data/Customer Success and Experience teams; people from various other teams have taught during these sessions as well.
The open source projects and SDKs are built/maintained by Customer Success Engineers, Experience, Middleware, and Platform team members and contributed to by many developers from throughout our community.
The community team doesn't "own" any of these things; we just see lots of value in them and believe that our team (individually and collectively) has knowledge, skills, expertise, and experience that make us especially helpful in (a) being organizational leaders (b) being accountable for the proper execution of the related strategies and tactics, (c) facilitate and support our coworkers' involvement, (d) help ensure that we make the most of our efforts in these areas, (e) always empathize and advocate for our community members, (f) uphold a code of conduct.
##Responsibilities
###Accountability 
We're accountable for the investments we make (time, money, social capital) and the benefits they create (for Keen and others.) Community is a difficult thing to track, measure, quantify, ROI-ify. But it can be done, and we're responsible for figuring out how. We see this challenge as an opportunity, and we've launched a collaborative project to figure it out for ourselves and hopefully help other community teams do the same.
The equation: identify the things that are important, determine how to measure the things, gather data around those things, make sense of the data and turn it into meaningful information and valuable insights.
Want examples? Thought so.
Present: Justin is building a map app (yay, rhyming!) that plots where we do events in the world and where our customers are in the world. Using a nifty platform called Keen IO, we can analyze the data around those events and our customer signups to determine correlation between our IRL activity and customer acquisition (and eventually revenue.)
Future: Open Source has been a big part of our strategy. Wouldn't it be cool to map those efforts to revenue? We think it can be done. Our friends at SendGrid have been able to show the percentage of their total revenue that comes from customers who depend on their OSS libraries for their integration. We plan to learn from them, start with our SDKs, and shed the same light on our big OSS projects like Dashboards, PingPong, PushPop, etc. With this intelligence...well, you get the point.
###Optimization 📈 Community is a long-term strategy by nature. However tactics within the strategy can be geared to create specific and targeted gains in the short term as well. We are responsible for crafting our gameplan appropriately.
###Inclusion:revolving_hearts: Keen IO has been built with community at its heart. The founders built our community, the early employees strengthened our community, and we all play a role in shaping it before, during, and after our time as employees. Community might remind you of culture in this regard.
As such the community team can't define who or what our community is. It can only act as stewards and catalysts and a mechanism for the involvement of all who choose to join, contribute, and play nice. We believe that community-mindedness should be baked into everything we do at Keen, from the inside out. We're here to help sift the flour and roll the dough.
