Community building
Build & grow your data science community
Communities help us discover new capabilities, connect with others, and solve problems faster. They help us get unstuck and prevent us from reinventing the wheel.
First things first
It doesn't have to be perfect right away.
Think of this as an experiment. It’s okay to try new things and see what works best. Everything isn’t set in stone. Experiment to see what works well for people across your company. Every team may be different.
Getting Started
Community isn’t one thing
Whether you're building community inside a company or across a local user group, we wanted to remind you that community can look like a lot of different things. Sometimes it's a scheduled talk or a curated newsletter, and sometimes it's just a social get-together, with no presentation at all.
Many organizations and groups take a multi-pronged approach. It's not just a Slack or Discord server, it's the events you run, the way you reach people across teams or across a city, and everything in between.
A few examples, adaptable to either setting:
- A casual social gathering (coffee shop, brewery, a walk around the city, etc.) with no agenda beyond spending time together
Monthly community meetups with 1 presentation or with 3 lightning talks
- A TidyTuesday built around a shared dataset (a company dataset internally, or a local/open dataset for a regional group)
A monthly spotlight on a community member, featuring a short "10 questions" interview
- A curated monthly newsletter for the community
- An annual conference or meetup day (Shiny Day, for example) with a live workshop and a half-day of groups presenting their own apps and use cases
A central repository or website holding all the material: learning pathways, recorded talks, and more
How do I find people?
Start with who you already know. Think about a great talk at an industry conference, a presentation at your own company, someone you met at a Data Science Hangout, or a blog post that stuck with you. If someone's work resonated with you, tell them. That can be a great opening to ask if they'd want to help build something new together.
From there, widen the search. LinkedIn and similar tools make it easy to find people with shared interests: search your area (or your company) for members of groups like the R Project for Statistical Computing or the Python Developers Community.
Want a hand with this? Reach out to rachael@posit.co. We're happy to help you find your first co-organizers or speakers.
Community Tip
Welcome people into your party
Think of your community event like a party at your house. Welcome people in, show them around, and introduce them to someone they'd enjoy talking to. Remember that every event may be someone's first time there. Engagement grows when people feel comfortable, and it's the small intentional gestures that turn a one-time attendee into a regular.
Building Engagement
Don't wait for volunteers, invite them!
Two things that trip up new community builders: waiting for volunteers and trying to please everyone. Communities that thrive aren't the ones waiting for people to raise their hands. They're the ones with someone behind the scenes personally inviting, welcoming, and planning. It's a bigger job than it looks, but it's also what makes all the difference. Libby and Rachael at Posit have learned most of what they know about community building by just getting started and actually doing it.
Identify potential new members
Regis James at Regeneron thinks about community building the way an engineer thinks about a pipeline. He identifies potential members through the company directory, reaches out once with a warm standardized message, and onboards the people who respond into a clear, welcoming structure. The result is an engaged community that keeps growing organically.
Encouraging others to get involved is what sustains a community over time.
Spend one-on-one time with someone and make the ask personal: "We're planning out the next few months of events, would you be open to sharing your work on x, y, z? I'm always happy to chat through some ideas too!"
Keep the group open rather than narrowing it to one topic or tool invites more people in than a strict theme would.
Offer a series of short, lightning talks. Lower stakes make it easier for someone to say yes, especially if it's their first time presenting.
Ask "What's something you're proud of lately?" or "What's something new you've learned this month?" It gets people talking from a place of what they've learned, not what they're missing.
Make room for people who aren't ready to present yet. Encouraging chat during virtual events, or inviting people into a Slack, Teams, or Discord channel, gives them a lower-pressure way to start contributing and meeting others.
Community as a key driver of transformation
Dooti Roy, Executive Director, Head of Innovation, Clinical Data Sciences at Boehringer Ingelheim shares that community is an instrumental piece of their change management. She highlights, "From starting with the early adopters, these people build up the community from ground up and now it has become a safe space where people just come throw questions and the community helps each other out...to understand things that are different from their day to day work and how to implement it and what the challenges are. It's really lovely to see."
