EDIT: You can find this post and (soon) more in my new leaflet publication, chaotic culture engineering.

In my personal search for Ikigai, the thing that you love, are good at, the world needs and you can be paid for, I once again ran into the conclusion that I should focus my energy on what you could describe as community management. This time, the revelation came after working through the Oxide Computer Companies engineering application materials, producing 20 pages of somewhat unhinged ramblings in the process. Reading a job posting by another company, currently undergoing the growing pains of building a holistic community, sent me into a hyper focus to analyse our current failures as gathering technologists.

Imagine that you created some form of open project. Probably connected to open source repositories. If you do your job well, a small group of ambitious fans will just form on their own. Let loose on subreddits, reply threads and discord servers, most often an image forms that is well known. The content is dominated by discussions around your projects announcements and a flood of support requests from new users, answered by your early adopters.

That's not a bad thing in itself. There is a ton of valuable feedback to gather here. From time to time there's even good inspirational content that just bubbled up out of the community on its own. But if you are honest, isn't this still just a thinly veiled marketing exercise?

At this point, dedicated community management should be a priority. Developer relation roles are the current obvious answer to patch over your shortcomings. Once again, that's not a bad thing in itself. Being open about the technical support that is expected, can be more honest. Betting on hiring an established technology influencer, driven by hope that their audience will attach to your project until the end of its life, is more than risky.

But what if you want more? How do you empower more people with the work you do? How do you create the biggest impact for the common good?

My advice: engineer a culture.

Take a step back and work out what your projects values are. Dream about the future that your thing is a wholesome part of. Reach out to like minded communities and see what works for them. Broaden your scope and set yourself a mission. Build open and interoperable infrastructure, systems and tools. Produce content that inspires and educates. Become a host to all kinds of intersectional ambitious nerds, movements and projects. Keep it flexible to the point of fluidity. Be proud and transparent about your involvement, but keep it chill. Nobody likes it when the Tupperware is brought out. And know when to let go.

Build a house and the contributors will come. If you are in need of staff to pull off this stunt, just look around. Talk to the people that run your local hackerspace, organise meet-ups and events, or generally live at the busy intersection of art and technology. They will do this for free, but please, don't undervalue their unique craft.

The culture that has been my personal home, gave me this nice quote that captures the essence of the meta-mission:

Diving into the nitty gritty details of how this could be achieved is fun, but I prefer putting out an abstract vision to start collaborating and dream together. Bluesky and the AT Protocol ecosystem have proven to be a comfy place to develop such ideas.

Let's talk about this rough draft and how we could build nicer third spaces online and in physical space. And maybe you know someone to share it with, that is currently in need of a culture engineer. I spent a decade working in this space and feel pretty done with writing B2B SaaS, only to pay the bills.