Community Heat, or Why You Should Get Good at Events

One of our favorite DevRel authors, Shawn Wang, is back with another hot take. This one, specifically, is about heat. In his article Community Heat, or Why You Should Get Good at Events, Shawn makes the case for communities to use events as part of their annealing process—alternating "hot" and "cold" in order to stay warm.

The "hot" event (something that brings people together in real time) spills over into the cold community (a chat or forum that doen't have the same kind of zing) to keep the community warm, while the cold community passively builds excitement for the next "hot" event.

His main takeaway is that events matter, and to truly build community, you best get good at them.

The key factors he sees are:

• Venue: Hybrid offline-online allow everyone to attend in some way
• Frequency: Aim for different types at different frequencies
• Naming: Workshops sound (and are) more fun than webinars
• Curation: There's still a reason for RFPs
• Marketing: Go for registrations
• Post-production: You can always fix it in post ;)

For more, read Shawn's full article.