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Hi everyone, this is Jono Bacon, and today I want to talk to you about building exponential communities.
Jono Bacon explores how technology and shared purpose drive the growth of exponential communities worldwide.
Key Takeaways
- Communities are experiencing exponential growth driven by access to technology and communication.
- Human connection and contribution are essential for individual dignity and community success.
- Technological revolutions are interconnected and empower people globally.
- A strong sense of purpose and belonging fuels community engagement and achievement.
- Providing tools and knowledge is crucial to enable communities to thrive.
Summary
- Jono Bacon discusses the evolution and resurgence of communities despite past beliefs that community is dying.
- He highlights various revolutions—transportation, industrial, computing, internet, and 3D printing—and their interconnected impact on society.
- The video emphasizes that people are the core beneficiaries and drivers of these revolutions.
- Bacon stresses the fundamental human need for dignity, self-worth, and contribution to community or society.
- Access to technology, communication tools, and infrastructure empowers people to connect and collaborate globally.
- Technological growth curves predict that affordable computing power will soon rival human brain capacity.
- The expansion of internet and mobile phone usage worldwide connects billions, fostering new communities.
- A sense of purpose and belonging are identified as critical ingredients for successful communities.
- Effective communities empower members with tools, knowledge, and shared mission to achieve great things.
- Bacon advocates for simple, clear frameworks to understand and build thriving communities.
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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Now this story starts out in a place called Bedfordshire, England.
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I was raised in Bedfordshire, and when I was a kid, it looked a little bit like this.
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Now, when I was younger, my parents and my aunties and my uncles and my grandparents and many of their friends
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would often say to me, you know, people don't know their neighbors like they did back in the good old days.
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And what this narrative told me as a kid was that there was a belief that community is basically dead.
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That video games and movies and music and television are rotting our brains and that people don't really connect and hang out with each other like they used to.
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What's interesting to me is that in the last five or ten years, we've seen this incredible explosion in community.
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We've seen local farming organizations set up teaching kids how to grow sustainable produce.
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We've seen thousands of people all over the world documenting human knowledge in Wikipedia.
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We've seen the incredible impact of open source, which now runs much of the technical infrastructure of the world as many as well as many devices.
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We've seen the democratization of manufacturing with 3D printing.
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And profound political change happening in parts of the world where you'd never expect it to exist.
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This all begs the question, why?
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Why is this happening?
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Why do people get together in groups to do these things?
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This is a question that I've been thinking about and and working on for the majority of my career.
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I'm incredibly passionate about communities.
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I've seen what can happen when you get a group of people together, shared by an ethos and a mission
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with the tools and the knowledge to succeed.
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And just what results can flow.
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Now, I think to understand communities and to understand how we can harness them, we need to take a bit of a look at history.
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Over the years, we've seen many different revolutions.
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We've seen the transportation revolution, which provided a means in which we could ship things all over the world.
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The industrial revolution, which provided the means in which we could produce those items on mass.
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The computing revolution, which which put a computer in every office, in every home, in every pocket.
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The internet, which connected all of those computers so knowledge and collaboration could flow.
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And of course, this incredible revolution that's happening in 3D printing.
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In which anybody with a computer can basically manufacture almost anything.
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What's interesting is that all of these different revolutions are fundamentally connected.
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The transportation revolution led to the industrial revolution, which led to the computing revolution, and so on and so forth.
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And when we look at the primary constituents and the primary benefactors of these different revolutions, it's people.
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One of the things I've learned as I get older is that we often forget that we're people.
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We get so distracted by things in our lives that we forget that we're basically animals.
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And when you take away the screens and the computers and the cars and the video game consoles and the gadgets,
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we're all basically bags of blood and bones.
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And many of us have a very similar set of goals and ambitions and insecurities.
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I believe that everyone on this planet fundamentally wants to live a life of dignity.
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And to live a life of dignity,
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we need to feel like we have a sense of self-worth.
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And to have a sense of self-worth, we need to be able to contribute to our to our local community or to society in general.
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And to be able to contribute, we need to have access.
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What's interesting to me is that when we look at all of these incredible things,
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when we look at Wikipedia and open source and local community groups and this political or this political change,
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the reason why these things have happened is because people do now have access.
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This access has empowered people to do incredible things.
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Now this access comes in many different forms.
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It comes in the form of technology and communications infrastructure and tools and other things.
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What's interesting to me is that if we look at first of all at technology, we've seen this incredible exponential growth curve.
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This graph here shows how much computing power you get for $1,000 and how it's changed over the years.
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And according to this growth curve, in 2025, a $1,000 computer will be as powerful as a human brain.
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Following the curve to 2050, uh, one, uh, $1,000, uh, human, uh, $1,000 computer will be as powerful as all human brains combined.
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Now, this isn't science fiction, this is the technological growth curve as it's happening today.
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But it doesn't end there, when we look at communications.
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This graph shows the the growth of the internet across the world.
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Now, I admit that this graph only goes up to 2009.
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Um, but in 2009, a quarter of the world's population was online.
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And obviously, since 2009, that growth has only continued further.
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But these people are not getting connected through desktops and laptops.
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They're getting connected through cell phones.
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And the data shows that cell phone, uh, growth and usage is incredible too.
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And this shows the the forecast leading up to 2017.
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People are connecting via cell phones.
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Now, this isn't particularly surprising.
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The world itself is growing.
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This graph shows world population.
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Now, let's be clear, overpopulation is a real problem.
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And it has many detrimental impacts on the environment, on our culture and all the rest of it.
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But according to the data, one of the benefits that we do have is that if people are going to be having families and if the world is getting bigger,
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the one benefit that we do have is that those people are getting connected.
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That hundreds of millions of children are joining this global conversation.
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They're getting access to technology, they're getting access to communications and they're getting access to communities.
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And what this has is a profound impact on what we can achieve as people.
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Now, when we look at this, and I explored earlier on that we as people want to live a life of dignity,
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and we need to have a life of self-worth, and we need to be able to contribute.
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What are the attributes that fit connected people?
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My belief here is that when we look at what we want to achieve and what drives us as a group, as a community,
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is that we all want to feel like we have a sense of purpose.
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We want to contribute as a team towards making a difference.
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Now, that may be making a difference in a in a fairly directed area, it may be in software, it may be in hardware, it may be with a sports team, in your school, in your local community.
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Or it may be in a much bigger, uh, and on a much bigger stage as well, in terms of changing the world more fundamentally.
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But all of us want to feel that sense of purpose.
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And when we have that sense of purpose and we feel that we are empowered to achieve that sense of purpose,
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incredible things are possible.
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And this is where most successful communities have, this is this is what happens to most successful communities.
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Is that people have that sense of purpose and they have the tools and the knowledge that empower them to do great things.
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And when they can do great things, it builds us incredible sense of belonging.
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And belonging is the number one ingredient that we want to grow and build
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um, in our communities.
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The very best communities have community members that feel like they're part of something, that they belong.
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That if they leave, that they will be missed.
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But they don't have that sense of entitlement.
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That is the number one goal that we want to achieve.
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Now, I'm a relatively straightforward person.
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I'm a relatively simple person.
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Uh, many of you who are watching this will probably know me.
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And anyone who's met me will testify that I am a pretty simple person.
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I like to break things down into simple constructs.
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To take a bird's eye view of things and then to zoom down into the detail.
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And I'm of the view that all communities can be divided into two types, read and write communities.
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So read communities are the kind of communities where people get together to consume a common interest.
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To meet other people who are like-minded.
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This could be a book or a movie, a piece of software, a video game.
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It it doesn't really matter.
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These are people who get together to meet like-minded people and have fun with each other around that common interest.
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Right communities are the kind of communities that collaborate together to create things.
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To work together on different problems and to achieve different outcomes.
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So a good example of that is something such as open source.
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People originally come together with open source to use the technology, and then what happens is they realize they can collaborate around the technology and they work to make it better.
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Now, read communities are relatively simple in many ways to form.
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You basically put together communications infrastructure and you inspire people to to to to spend time on
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in in communicating and potentially around different projects as well.
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And if we look at the primary areas where communities form, it's really in social media.
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And for example, with Twitter, we've seen incredible growth in Twitter.
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And it's not just with Twitter as well, we've seen it with Facebook as well.
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We've seen incredible growth happening across a multitude of different social media networks.
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Um, if we look at right communities,
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uh, many of these communities form their own infrastructure and they form their own communities.
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In which in which they can they can track growth differently.
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But interestingly, if we look at common examples of this, such as Wikipedia,
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we've seen phenomenal growth there.
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We if we look at OpenStreetMap, we've seen, this is basically a an open source equivalent to Google Maps.
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Um, just incredible contributor growth there.
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Open source as a wider ecosystem has seen remarkable growth.
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And things such as 3D printing has seen remarkable growth.
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And what this data tells me, when you look at all of these graphs that I've shown you in this presentation, is that technology is exponential.
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We've seen that with the $1,000 of computing power and many other examples too.
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Access is exponential.
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We're seeing readily and cheaper access to the internet.
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But also importantly,
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community is exponential too.
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We've seen this passion for people to participate, to have that sense of dignity and sense of self-worth and and sense of purpose.
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Now, what's interesting to me is that when we look at these slides, when we look at this data that I've just shown you,
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um, it's easy for us to sit down and say, yeah, that's cool.
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We're seeing growth in all of these different areas.
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But in my mind, the numbers are not interesting, what's interesting are the trends and the patterns.
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And this is one of the things I I say in all of my presentations and all my teaching.
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Is that we need to look at the patterns because the patterns pull out different opportunities that can help us to succeed in different ways.
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So as an example, if we look at this, we know that in 2025, $1,000 of computing power
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will get us something as powerful as a human brain.
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And we also know that, um, there's going to be millions and millions of additional people who are going to be connecting to the internet.
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And we also know that primarily they're going to be connecting to the internet via cell phones.
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And we've also seen here that we have a passion around collaboration, around participation in community.
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What this tells me is that there is an increasingly, uh, significant opportunity for us to have bold and audacious ideas.
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Instead of saying, yeah, why don't we form a community that will that will build a piece of technology or that we'll do this little thing?
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Why don't we think big?
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Let's think of of the the significant things that we can achieve in our lives.
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If we know we're going to have that computing power, if we know we're going to have that many people who could potentially join our communities, and we know that that passion exists,
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what could we achieve in 2025?
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What could we achieve in 2050?
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A good example of this is Wikipedia.
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Jimmy Wales, you know, didn't set out with a mission to, hey, why don't we write some things down?
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He said, why don't we document human knowledge?
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Why don't we all put it, why don't we put it into an online encyclopedia that everybody can access freely?
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And it was that bold and audacious mission, which is now produced a service that is helping our kids to learn, that's helping everybody to get educated.
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So the opportunity of communities here is profound.
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The technology is there, the access is there, and the desire is there for people to do incredible things.
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Now, many of you who are watching this will will work in a company.
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And you will you will work in an organization.
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Or you'll be part of a a local community or a global community.
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And you'll be trying to understand, okay, what's the value of investing time in building communities?
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Like, what do I get out of it?
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Let's delve into this a little bit.
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So if we look at the value in monetary terms, let's look at a couple of examples.
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The Smithsonian, who are pretty well reputed organization,
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uh, performed a, uh, a study into how much Wikipedia could be valued at.
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Now, I would argue that Wikipedia is one of the most notable collaborative communities in the world.
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And the Smithsonian valued it at tens of billions of dollars.
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All of that content coming from all of those different people, hundreds, hundreds of thousands of of people contributing actively,
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millions of articles, hundreds of languages have resulted in tens of billions of dollars of value.
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Likewise, the Linux Foundation, who are another well well-respected organization that are the stewards of Linux,
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which is one of the most popular open source projects in the world,
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did an did did a a piece of work in which they estimated how much it would cost to rebuild a typical Linux operating system from scratch.
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Using a proprietary model where you hired developers.
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And their estimation was $10.8 billion.
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This is from a project that has included tens of thousands of developers.
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And hundreds of different companies all working together.
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So the monetary value here is significant.
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If we get people together and they have those tools and that knowledge to be successful,
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we can drive real value in terms of dollars.
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But it doesn't end there.
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There are many other supplementary benefits that we get when we collaborate.
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When you take maybe an existing project, an existing piece of technology, and then you open it up to a community so they can participate too.
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We get additional knowledge.
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People coming in with new ideas and fresh perspectives.
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We get different methods of collaboration.
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You'll get people coming in and providing collaborative resources and tools and services that you'd never be able to originally, uh, fund or resource, uh, if if you have a paid development team or a paid team that's working on your community.
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We have different levels of expertise.
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It's amazing how you can have individuals who can come into communities with just a profound level of of knowledge about very, very specific areas.
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And they become they become experts in those areas that benefit your particular piece of technology.
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It opens us up to new consumers.
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It builds a new level of rigor.
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We have to think about collaboration at a wider scale.
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How do we scale up?
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How do we get more people involved?
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How do we make sure that our processes are as sleek and efficient as possible?
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And then of course, this opens up brand commitment and new markets.
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There is the word community has a very human feel to it.
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Um, admittedly, it's fluffy and it's in some cases in specific.
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But nobody hates the word community, nobody hates the notion of us getting together to do things as a group.
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It is fundamentally in the DNA that makes us human beings.
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And that sense of commitment to communities will often build a commitment to brands.
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And that will often open up new markets for people.
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So, it's clear to me that when we look at the exponential growth curves in technology, in access,
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in in the in the passion around people collaborating together,
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that it makes sense to invest and think about a community strategy.
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But here's the thing.
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Wanting it is not enough.
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Wanting to build a strong community is simply not enough.
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We have to think about how we're going to do it.
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We have to be planned and we have to be strategic.
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If we go into building a community in a laissez-faire manner and we basically say, okay, well, we'll throw these pieces together and we'll see how it works out,
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you've got to be lucky to be successful.
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And my goal here in the work that I try to do is to assure success, to build rigor around how we build successful communities.
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Open source is where much of this has happened.
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And I believe that open source is where society innovates.
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I believe that many of the methods in which we collaborate around building technology,
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and building services, and building communities has happened in open source.
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I've been a member of the open source community since 1998.
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And I've picked up basically everything that I've learned from this community.
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Um, at least until the last six or seven years where I started bringing the principles of community management to other types of industries and organizations too.
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Now, when you look at technology adoption or innovation adoption, we often use this thing.
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This is a this is a a useful tool that you can use to demonstrate how adoption occurs of of of innovation.
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In the early days, in the left side of this graph, uh, we get the early adopters.
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These are the in sorry, the innovators, these are the people who are right at the beginning, who are right at the beginning of a new piece of technology happening.
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We then start seeing the early adopters, these are the people who are excited to be a part of this thing before people really know about it.
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We then get into the early majority, this is where we start seeing, um, innovation or technology becoming more commonplace.
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And more people start using it.
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At the top of that curve, in that central line, this is this is where the majority of people are using that innovative technology.
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And then we start getting into people who are a little late to the game in the laggards right at the end.
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Now, let's look at how community management has has thrived and has developed in the open source world.
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Where I believe that this is where we've been innovating.
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I think that in 1998, this is where we started to really see, um, true innovation in community management in the open source world.
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It's where we started thinking about how we, uh, focus on problems.
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How we put infrastructure in place.
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How we think about governance.
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Um, how we think about managing contributions.
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Um, how do you get developers to be a part of a project when they haven't proven themselves yet?
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A lot of this kind of thinking really started, uh, happening at a very small scale in 1998.
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I think that in 2004, we started really seeing the early adoption piece.
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This is where more and more communities were forming and more and more people were taking an interest in how we how we coordinate those volunteers in a way that helps them to be successful.
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And helps to benefit the actual open source project as well.
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But in 2010, this is where I think we started seeing community management be part and parcel of of how you run an open source project.
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One of the things that I organize every year is this is this event called the Community Leadership Summit in Portland.
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And every year we get hundreds of people who show up from a variety of different sectors.
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Many from open source, but many from other areas as well.
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And I've been running the the the Community Leadership Summit since 2009.
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And it was really around 2010 that we started seeing this real interest, this diversity.
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It was it was not the same faces that were showing up in previous events.
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It was it was a different type of people, people coming from new perspectives with new ideas about how they could explore community management.
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Now, when we look at the wider community management growth curve,
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when we look at how community management has has percolated into the wider sphere of the world,
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I think it's different.
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I think it looks more like this.
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Is that we're still very much in the early adoption phase, that's I think is as largely passed.
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But we're now starting to get into the early majority.
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You can thank social media and and large advocacy campaigns,
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uh, such as Kony 2012 and things like that.
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That have really thrust community management as a concept and as a principle into the into the mindset of people.
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Now, what this tells me is that this opens up an opportunity.
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This opens up an opportunity, particularly for those people who have observed or been part of the open source world,
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or who want to go and observe what's happened in the open source world.
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To grow communities that are innovative, that are first movers in different areas.
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Um, being at the at the forefront of a of a revolution, whether it was in transportation or the industrial revolution, or the computing revolution,
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or the internet revolution or the 3D printing revolution,
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whatever, being at the forefront of those different revolutions put you at a at a significant benefit and and opened up many opportunities.
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And I believe that community management is also going to be one of those revolutions that's happening.
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So how do we do this?
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How do we create an effective community?
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Well, in a nutshell, what we do is we first of all define a mission.
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What do we want to go out and achieve?
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Then what we do is we map out a strategy.
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Um, what do we want to achieve?
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When do we want to achieve it?
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And what does success look like?
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Then what we do is we focus on deploying infrastructure.
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You know, we provide the infrastructure for communication, for collaboration,
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uh, for keeping track of what people are working on.
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Uh, for getting people together at events, at social settings.
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That infrastructure is going to be critical.
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Next, what we do is we create a series of engagement on-ramps.
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So if you think about your community and think about the different ways in which people can participate, this could be developers or translators or documentation writers or advocates or business people.
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What we do is for each of those different methods of participating, we think about crafting a journey, an experience that helps someone get involved as quickly as easily.
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Uh, and as quickly and as easily as possible.
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I call those things on-ramps.
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Then what we do is we keep score.
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We track everything.
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We keep as many numbers as we can.
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Um, and we use those numbers not as a means to find failure and to find, um, issues, but we use that as a means to find success, to find opportunities where we can tweak and optimize the different elements of our strategy.
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But finally, what we do is we execute honestly.
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We look at our goals in that strategy, uh, and we look at that infrastructure that we deploy, and we look at those on-ramps.
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And we review them honestly.
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Are they working?
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You know, have we done something, uh, correctly and we should continue to explore and learn from those lessons, or if we screwed something up?
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You know, I'm a big believer in failing forward.
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That failure is a good thing, so long as we identify why we failed and we use that to to inform and guide our future paths.
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And executing honestly is a critical piece.
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Particularly as a lot of these communities that are forming are new, they're different.
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And people don't necessarily have all of the answers to those questions.
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Now, what's really important here when we're thinking about building a community strategy,
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is that we define what success looks like.
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Because one of the things that I'm seeing increasingly in many, uh, cases is that community managers join a company.
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Uh, because an executive team decide that they need to have a community management strategy.
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A community manager joins the company.
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And then the community manager proceeds to perform some work, and then at the at the review period to see what that work looks like and see what kind of success has happened, the expectations from the senior management team and the expectations of the community manager are completely different.
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And that causes a lot of stress, a lot of angst.
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In some cases, people either leave or get fired.
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And like with every organization, what we need to do is we need to level set what expectations are going to be.
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And invariably, this can often cause challenges within marketing, community and engineering teams.
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Because in each of these different three teams,
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um, we invariably have three different philosophies.
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Uh, in many marketing teams, there is a philosophy of wider adoption and brand protection and making sure that you have rigorous brand, uh, commitment.
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And you don't step outside of that, uh, outside outside of those brand guidelines.
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In many community teams, it's much more agile and much more free-flowing.
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And the idea that it's okay to be scrappy because the goal is that we're figuring our path forward.
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And we're trying different things.
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It's a it's a very strong sense of of experimentation.
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Um, and learning from those lessons.
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And in many engineering teams, many engineering teams focus on rigor.
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It's engineering rigor and and making sure that we we can build a strong and capable platform for moving forward.
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So you have these subtle philosophical differences in these different teams.
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Um, and community often floats in between both of them, particularly in open source communities.
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The community team is often engaging on a day-to-day level with engineers, getting people to be a part of the community, getting those patches and branches reviewed, making sure that people are are able to play a part in in a in an engineering project in a way that gives them editorial opportunities as well as just building and and writing code.
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But then on the marketing side of things, we're dealing with a brand that maybe is very driven by a particular organization and, uh, and maybe some marketing people don't necessarily want to loosen the control over those brands.
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So we need to level set those pieces.
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And that's why that strategic plan is so important.
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Is that what it does is it gets everybody on the same page in terms of success.
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It's better to have that conversation about what we're doing before we do the work.
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Then when the work has been completed and everybody's looking to point fingers at why things happened in certain ways.
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Now, one of the challenges here as well is as I mentioned is that, um,
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community management, uh, is a very new art.
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And is is very new art and science.
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And consequently, there are not that many community managers around.
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And sadly, there are some people who are not very good at what they do, at least from my perspective.
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Um, and part of what can cause some complexity in some of these organizations is that is that community managers are hired to grow the numbers.
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Let's get more people involved in our community, in our Twitter account, on our Facebook account.
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Just get the numbers up.
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And my view here is, don't hire for the numbers.
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Hire for the journey.
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Hiring for the journey is critical.
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My view is that a community manager looks at a community as a journey and as an ecosystem.
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And looks at it from that bird's eye view to map out a great community experience for people to participate.
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And then work to make sure that all of those different details, all those different elements are smooth and crisp and effective in how somebody participates.
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And there are so many different variables there, it's making sure that the infrastructure is there.
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That, uh, that the communication channels are there.
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It's making sure that, uh, that people feel engaged.
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That they feel empowered.
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That they feel happy.
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It's making sure that people are healthy in the way that they engage.
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That they're not that they're not burning themselves out.
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It's making sure that you have that good balance between the commercial investment and the and the and the volunteer investment.
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So, hire somebody who is looking to build out that ecosystem.
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Not just somebody who can get, who's who's maybe, you know, going to fly out to a bunch of conferences and get them to talk very positively.
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You want that more structured, that more structured and strategic person who's driving your community strategy.
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Now, as I mentioned earlier on, I'm a big believer in fail in failing forward.
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And I think that with all new innovative endeavors,
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whether it is whether it was that transportation revolution or the industrial revolution, the computing revolution, and so on.
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Every single one of those revolutions had great decisions and bad decisions.
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And it's the same thing with building a community.
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Community, there's no there is no, um, recipe for building a strong community.
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There a community is is very dependent on the individuals, it's dependent on the kind of project that you're running.
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It's dependent on the organization that's involved.
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If there's a commercial backer.
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It's highly, highly contextual in how it operates.
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And one of the things you have to accept in my mind is a culture and build a culture of agility and experimentation.
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Some things are going to work, some things are not going to work very well.
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In my career as a community manager, I've had many, many bad ideas that I've tried and they haven't really worked out.
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Nothing that's, you know, that's that's broken the farm.
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But but ideas that we've tried that we thought would be a good idea and they didn't really work out.
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And importantly, what we did is we learned from those lessons and that helped us to guide other ideas.
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Uh, so we wouldn't make those kinds of mistakes in the future.
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So, failure is a great thing, it's a wonderful thing that we should embrace.
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And we should optimize, uh, for when it when it happens.
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That we should optimize for how we prevent it from happening again in the future.
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Um, this is obviously just scratching the surface of of a lot of this kind of content.
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You can go and check out my book, The Art of Community, uh, which you can go and you can you can see a link to this in the in the YouTube video comments.
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Um, and this provides a a really in-depth guide for how you build a lot of how you can build a lot of communities.
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Um, you can go and buy it, but you can also download it for free from the website.
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And if you've got any questions, uh, please feel free to contact me at [email protected].
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Uh, you can also find my website at jonobacon.org.
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And you can find my Twitter at @jonobacon.
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Thank you, everybody, and have a great day.
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Bye.
Topics:Jono Baconexponential communitiescommunity buildingtechnology and communityopen source3D printinginternet growthsense of purposebelonginghuman connection
