7 Tips to Empower Your Members and Help Grow Your Community

We discuss quite a number of technologies and productivity techniques on the TopCoder Blog. Whether it’s ideas around how to tackle Big Data through Open Innovation competitions, or the disruptive capabilities of the quantified self movement and the “miracle” material Graphene, or is simply a fun design-focused post utilizing amazing imagery, we canvass quite a bit. We also routinely discuss community and it’s never lost on us that without our community, TopCoder would not even exist. We are – before and after anything else – a community.

As many of you are likely aware, we recently crossed the 400,000 community member marker a few months back and though most TopCoder members participate through virtual means, more and more TopCoder members are organizing and hosting traditional, physical meet-ups and coding events.

A long-time TopCoder community member crni (Dejan Pazin) recently organized and hosted such an event. We caught up with Dejan post-event and asked him 7 questions about his effort and event. His answers are worth the read and supplied us with 7 tips to empower your members to help you grow your community. Enjoy the interview and the 7 tips below.

Q1: Dejan, how long have you been a TopCoder community member and what is your area of expertise (or your favorite types of competitions)?

A1: I am from Ljubljana, Slovenia and I’ve been a TopCoder member since 2004. I am not really an expert, but I love competing against my friends at Algorithm Competitions. The point is that none of us train for these types of competition but luckily TopCoder offers DIV II for such competitors. We (including myself) managed to get some rewards, I still have the cheque for $20 stored at home.

Community Growing Community – Tip #1: All you need is love. There are individuals within your community who are very passionate about their involvement. The first tip is to allow them to showcase this passion as Dejan has done for TopCoder.

Q2: What was the inspiration behind hosting GoCoder? – When did you first get the idea to do this?

A2: It all started as an internal challenge among colleagues at work – being best at TopCoder was sort of prestige. Since it took a couple of hours during work, we later took it to the next level, agreed with management and arranged for the whole afternoon event. To make it even more fun we combined it with competing in Go-Karts. The motto here was that writing quality code is not enough, in the real world you need other skills too and racing Go-Karts seemed like a good candidate to symbolize that.

After a couple of internal events where we all had loads of fun, we realized that this is actually a quality team building effort as well. That’s when the idea of a public event was born – the GoCoder.

Community Growing Community – Tip #2: Competition is healthy. At TopCoder, all of the assets created for our clients are born from competition, so this is innate to our world. Perhaps your community is different, but it may be worth it to allow community members to structure fun competitions that foster participation.

Q3: What was the initial response from your community? Was it easy or hard to gain momentum, get folks interested in coming to a geo-location to gather for a live competition?

A1: It was easy to get those already competing on TopCoder to take part, but there are not many of them here in Slovenia. So I took the approach of presenting this as a reward for the hard working programmers and persuaded the management to give them the afternoon off. I soon got the 8 teams to apply. Maybe the slogan helped: Anti-stress therapy for competitive programmers

Community Growing Community – Tip #3: Let your community members get creative. You may know your community well, but they know their “world” better than anyone. Trust them to create value.

Q4: How many people competed? Of the competitors, how many were competing for the first time on TopCoder?

A1: In the end, 7 teams of 3 competitors showed up for the event (one team was out due to work related obligations). We were competing on TopCoder SRM (Single Round Match) 544 and for the vast majority of coders (15 or more) this was their first TopCoder competition. The results they achieved in the TopCoder competition were of course not superb, but that was not an issue at all – the fun was just as good.

Community Growing Community – Tip #4: Allow and encourage your members to do what is best for their niche community. At TopCoder we rarely host competitions involving teams. For Dejan, he felt this was a great way to motivate his group to participate. He weaved in a team element for his event that worked and still stayed within the structure of TopCoder competitions that require competition on an individual level.

Q5: Can you share with the community how you approached attaining sponsorship for this event and any advice you can give to others who might be looking to host their own event?

A1: Obviously, finding the sponsors is the hardest part. First off, this is completely new to all of the potential sponsors and second, the recession is still in effect, so no one is very keen on sponsoring anything. So I took the low budget – big fun approach. By that I mean this was a cheap way to get programmers a quality team building experience. In order to get the prize sponsors I spoke with a small company, which needs all the publicity they can get. For the main prize I managed to get a single sponsor – I simply got lucky here as a large company I contacted went along with it.

Community Growing Community – Tip #5: Encourage members who are hosting an event to concentrate on value. Dejan delivered an alternate team building exercise and did so in a relatively inexpensive way.

Q6: What were the toughest parts of creating and hosting this event? What might you do differently next time now that you have hosted this first one?

A1: I guess the fact that the idea is completely new to everyone makes it really hard. Once you have some history to show for, or some reference from someone else, it should be easier. Next time I’d like to make it even bigger, maybe 40 people or so, and have enough sponsors to make it almost free for competing.

Community Growing Community – Tip #6: Zero to one is the hardest lift. As an operator of a community do all you can to showcase efforts like Dejan’s so the next person who wants to host their own gathering understands it has been done before and they are empowered to do it as well.

Q7: Any other tips?

A7: If there is just one tip I can give, it would be: Don’t forget about the fun! Make it look and feel cool and relaxed. The programmers have enough stress already, what they need is stress-free fun.

And one more thing: I have to thank TopCoder for your help and support.

Community Growing Community – Tip #7: Fun is very powerful. Many join a community because it offers them an opportunity to do work on, or become educated in an area they deem fun and personally rewarding. Do all you can to help your community members who are leading efforts like this to ramp-up the fun factor!

We at TopCoder would like to send a very special thank you to Dejan Pazin for organizing this ambitious event. It is efforts like yours that make our community truly special and we appreciate all you have done and continue to do. Thank you Dejan.