Building a Community—It’s the economy vision, stupid! #

On November 18, 2025, the institutional networking affinity group got together to discuss “10 recommended practices for creating a robust community of remote developers”. Ok, we’ll be honest, it was just J.C. and Julia, but it was a very productive discussion. In this blog post, we’ll summarize the discussion highlights for everyone who could not be at the meeting or for whomever stumbles across this post in the future.

A good chunk of the meeting was spent discussing the first point in the reading—“Cultivate a Shared Vision and Purpose.” We agreed that this was potentially the most important point of all. If you don’t have a vision for the community you are trying to build, then people do not have an incentive to join the community and engage with it. Creating a vision for a local RSE community can be challenging, however, as many of us want to achieve so many different things such as enabling RSEs to connect and learn from each other, advocating for the RSEs at their institution to increase recognition of their work, and creating a career path for RSEs. This wide range of goals can muddy the waters to an extent that it becomes hard to decide where to start and what step to take first.

While talking about visions and community goals, the following thought came up (which is likely better discussed somewhere else, feel free to let us know any good readings about this!). For our purposes, we identified three different types of community members:

• The passionate, core members that drive the community forward.
• The engaged members that show up to meetings and contribute to an extent.
• The “listening in” members that are part of a Slack channel or mailing list, but are not engaging for the most part.

When trying to create a local RSE community, we came to the conclusion that first you need to find one or two other people who share your passion and become core members. You need this support for your community building efforts as this is something you cannot do all by yourself. Once you have your core group of members, you want to grow the other two layers of your community. You need people who show up to events you organize and maybe contribute to the organization of those events or are willing to present at them. And last but not least, you’ll need the “listening in” members that are aware of your efforts, show up to events from time to time, and most importantly can spread the word. While it can be frustrating at times like shouting into void and hearing nothing back, it is important to remember that even if no one responds, it doesn’t mean that no one heard your message.

It is also important to be aware of these different types of community members when planning events and activities. While any activity should be in support of your overall vision, different activities speak to different types of community members. Not all kinds of events will be met with the same enthusiasm by all members. For instance, a meetup to discuss a specific technology will likely have fewer attendees than a talk on a specific project or topic as a “listening in” member is more likely to attend a talk where they can hang back and not engage than a meetup that comes with the expectation for attendees to contribute.

Turning back to the reading, we agreed that many of the points were geared towards bigger communities that have the capacity to organize more structured programs. However, we did discuss the idea of mentorship for a little while. We came to the conclusion that this is something that would be an argument for institutions to support any local community building efforts. Many RSEs are fairly isolated in their groups being the only RSE on a team, which can mean a lack of technical but also career mentorship. This can lead to frustrations and dissatisfaction with the position, which in turn may result in RSEs leaving the organization. A local RSE community can foster connections between RSEs from different groups and departments that might lead to mentorship relationships and higher job satisfaction. This can help in retaining talent, which is in the interest of the overall organization.

We also discussed various other topics as they came up during our meeting. However, some of those were just mentioned as a side note while others deserve their own blog posts. We might expand on some of them in future meetings. A first one that comes to mind is the development of a list of arguments about why supporting local RSE communities is in their interest. So stay tuned!