Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
These power users, members of the community who are highly knowledgeable and re-
sponsive, represent the backbone of your community. They will often help shape the com-
munity in how it approaches and how it builds the tools used, shape the project direction
as a whole, and raise awareness of the project to others whom you might not reach
without them. In addition, their attitudes can affect everything, so it's important that you
find people who are generally positive and helpful. I also like to consider geographical
location. If you can have people developing your project across a vast geographical area,
more people in those areas are also likely to start to build the project in a public way.
In some ways, your community may be more valuable than your actual project. Valu-
able communities build valuable content, product support, and ideas. The community is
the glue that holds the hardware documentation together. It's what separates your project
from others. It draws in developers to the community and convinces them that the best
way to express their ideas is by contributing to the content of the community, to the pro-
ject. The community gives people a reason to know the project, to engage with it, and to
introduce it to their friends.
So what sort of content can they contribute?
With the Lasersaur project, we found ourselves in an interesting position. We used
Kickstarter to obtain the initial funding for the project, but more importantly we had a
community of more than 300 developers supporting the project before we even had a
working prototype. The campaign brought in physicists working with laser beam dynam-
ics, NASA engineers, and people who knew a lot more than we ever did about a lot of
what we were developing. Their feedback and advice helped shape the project in invalu-
able ways that capital could not.
Valuable content could be a simple blog post that someone writes about the project. It
could be a video, tutorial, or article. By creating valuable content that resonates with
people and that they want to share and engage with, you earn links to your site, answer
frequently asked questions, and gain social media attention. By doing community building
right, you create an entire experience. It then becomes both an advocate for community
building and a perpetuating step in continued community building. Community building
even helps in sharing documentation standardization! Make sure to check out
Appendix E
,
Mach 30's Documentation Ground Rules
,
for a checklist of rules when documenting.
