Building a Globally Accessible Community

The presentation discusses strategies for building and growing a successful community, including engaging with members, showcasing personal stories, and using metrics to track progress.

• Engage with members through events, personal stories, and third-party metrics
• Use metrics to track community growth and engagement
• Encourage local languages and representation in community events
• Empower community members to organize their own events
• Share success stories and third-party metrics to communicate the value of the community

The presenter shares the story of Avinash, an organizer of a Postman Meetup in Bangalore, who has grown the group to over 1200 members and regularly has 100 people in attendance. Avinash has been organizing the Meetup on his own, but has the full backing of Postman to continue doing so.

Building a diverse community is an aspiration for many open source professionals but doing so takes more than mission statements and boilerplate Code of Conducts. With many marketing, developer relations, and engineering resources focused in North America and Europe, community is often underserved in other regions, effectively closing the door to a large swath of talented developers around the world. It takes active effort to foster globally accessible communities but momentum is possible with dedicated steps. This talk will cover the benefits of a globally accessible community and ways to build momentum for geographical and cultural inclusion. We’ll explore: - How to communicate the value of investing in inclusive programs & global communities - How to build globally accessible programs and common pitfalls - How to advocate for an inclusion, both internally and externally We’ll illustrate these points with real-life examples from some of the largest global tech communities.