DevOps is the best, isn’t it? It feels great to be empowered to accomplish your goals without costly handoffs from, and consultations with, functional teams. But what happens to an organization as it scales its DevOps teams past one or two? Silos. And what do you get with silos? Waste. Unless, of course, you can get the silos talking to each other.

In this talk, we’ll delve into one possible solution to this problem: community-building. DevOps teams need agency, without superfluous and misguided consistency edicts. They will also benefit from access to vetted materials, best practices, and a real-time sounding board to work through the challenges of navigating a shared space. The knock-on benefits of a well-built community are many:

• a continuous “hallway track” for developers to bounce ideas off of one another
• a forum for motivated individuals to hone their leadership skills
• a flattened organization where everyone gets a chance to contribute and learn
• an environment where live support for simple and/or well-solved problems is crowdsourced

All you need is a seed, a platform, and a few guiding principles, some of which may not be immediately obvious. We’ve all heard of making your vocation your vacation. This is kind of like that. Your organization should be productive, of course, but maybe a little less “concrete, beams, and rivets” and a little more “crayons, glue, and stickers”.

Here’s what attendees can expect to take away from this talk:

• a clear idea of why communities are important to a development organization
• a high-level view of communication archetypes, and how this is different
• an actionable set of ingredients for building a community wherever DevOps is being practiced