The word “community” comes up a lot in my software consulting work. There are open-source communities. Developer communities. Platform communities. Increasingly, companies expect their employees to form Communities of Practice to solve their cross-silo dysfunction. You’ll find “community” on strategy decks, in job titles, and embedded in marketing copy.
But when I work with software leaders on what that actually means and what real community looks like to them, I too often get platitudes or marketing slides.”Community” is what they say when “customer” feels too thirsty or “free labor” too honest. It’s a favorite industry euphemism, human enough to sound desirable, broad enough to mean nothing.
The mismatch between what is desired and what is implemented leads to company efforts that are often DOA. These communities flop not because the idea is bad but because the people “running the community initiative” are drawing upon their shallow experience. For example, take the community example as described by writer Allison P. Davis in The Cut. There, Davis explored what happens when software startups try to fix the “loneliness epidemic” with community approximations. The described results certainly triggered my unease: apps that offer paid friendships, gamified connections, and bookable plus-ones. It was like ordering Doordash but for communion.
The problem is real. In his 2000 book, Bowling Alone, author Robert D. Putnum describes the decline in non-workplace interactions. He argued that the reduction in everything from Knights of Columbus membership to church participation would have dire consequences for democratic discourse. Putnum references something as innocuous as the humble bowling league is a community capable of providing belonging, education, and enrichment for its members’ social lives. And yet, while the number of people who bowled increased in the past 20 years, the number of bowlers who bowled in leagues - much like any other group where social interactions may occur - has decreased.
Putnum’s observations happened more than a generation ago. The trend has only continued since then. And it is this lack of community experience, or what it means to be a part of a functioning one, is troubling.
In rural areas, community can be the difference between survival and ruin.
I grew up on a farm in rural South Dakota. There isn’t a slogan or brand engagement strategy for that community. It is an unspoken set of expectations and obligations that made the sometimes unpredictable and harsh turns of fate survivable.
There is never a good time to get sick - like really sick, like having to be hospitalized sick. But if a neighbor fell ill during harvest season, a year’s worth of work and tens of thousands of dollars in seed, fertilizer, and labor could be wiped out in a couple of ill-timed weeks.
When that happened (and it did happen), the response wasn’t only thoughts and prayers. It was a convoy of neighbors. People would show up with their combines, grain carts, semis - everything needed to get the crop in safe before the weather could decide otherwise. They’d put their own fields, deadlines, and fragile margins on hold. Because letting someone lose everything wasn’t an option.
There was no distributed disaster playbook. No pre-arranged phone tree. No nudges or banked service hours. People there don’t gussy it up as a “mutual aid network” or a “decentralized response framework.” They call it being a good neighbor.
It happened because it was what needed to be done. Being neighborly isn’t a service you subscribe to but a shared responsibility you can’t opt out of. You helped because you knew, someday, it might be you. And when it was, you’d need someone who remembered how you showed up for theirs.
In rural communities, the firefighter isn’t a stranger in uniform. It’s your neighbor. The coach isn’t an employee. It’s your uncle. The ambulance driver isn’t a city worker - it’s a volunteer who also works at the electric co-op.
In rural communities, the line between neighbors and supporting services is blurred.
Community is not just a rural thing.
But community isn’t just a rural thing. The pattern of showing up is everywhere if you know where to look.
There’s the story of Rogers Park, outside of Chicago, of a group of housed and unhoused neighbors who created Chili Night. Every Thursday, weather granting, people gather near a tent encampment in Touhy Park to share food, warmth, and company.
There’s no non-profit running it. No app. No GoFundMe. Just folding tables, Crock-Pots, and a shared understanding: sharing a meal isn’t a burden but a blessing.
As mentioned in the piece:
“It’s not about feeding the unhoused. It’s about being in community with each other.”
People show up for each other, week after week because presence itself is the point. Because being human in public, without hierarchy or prerequisites, is surprisingly rare and incredibly sustaining.
No check-ins. No metrics. No scalable impact report.
Just a ritual of care and the slow accumulation of trust to create a decentralized, voluntary, self-sustaining practice. You don’t need grain carts and combines to build that kind of system. You need regularity, a shared table, and the recognition that surviving alone is a myth.
That brings us back to the workplace and all the ways companies get this wrong.
You can’t scale what you haven’t practiced.
If Rogers Park offers an example of a functioning community that is low-cost, high-trust, and built on repeated presence, tech offers another: slick, structured, and one-directional. Many working in software wouldn’t know better because they haven’t experienced a real one. Or, if they have, they didn’t recognize it for what it was.
In software organizations, “community” is a term deployed with great enthusiasm and very little introspection. It’s used when we want engagement but don’t want to pay for support. It’s trotted out when we want to tout the total number of users but don’t want to do user research. It’s slapped on events, platforms, and newsletters because “customer” feels too transactional and “audience” too passive.
When tech leaders try to “build community” without understanding what community actually requires, the results are somewhere between awkward and quietly corrosive. They:
- Mistake audience for community. An audience listens. A community responds. If your strategy is built around likes, views, and passive consumption, you don’t have a community. You have reach. And reach is not the same as belonging.
- Equate participation with presence. Just because people show up doesn’t mean they feel safe, seen, or supported. Attendance is not connection. Zoom squares and emoji reactions are not proxies for trust.
- Expect engagement without reciprocity. You can’t ask people to contribute to something that gives them nothing back, whether that is in time, recognition, or psychological safety. A Slack channel full of ghosted questions isn’t a community. It’s a liability.
- Glorify lone heroes while ignoring maintainers. Tech loves a weekend war room. We reward the heroic save. But we ignore the ones who make sure it never broke in the first place. We’ve built cultures that celebrate firefighting and scoffs at fireproofing. No wonder people burn out.
- Delegate culture to tools. You can’t Workday your way into mutual trust. You can’t PowerPoint your way into shared values. Tools can help, but they don’t replace the emotional labor of actually showing up for each other.
It’s not that community can’t happen inside organizations. It’s that the conditions required to nurture it - trust, time, and shared responsibility - are almost always seen as overhead. And so the things that actually hold people together are dismissed as optional, inefficient, or “not part of the job.”
But if you’ve ever been part of a team that really worked, you know the truth:
Community doesn’t happen just because people are put in proximity to each other. It only happens because members went out of their way to do the things not easily quantified in their performance review.
Real communities are grown, not built.
You’re a leader, a practitioner, or someone who’s just tired of siloed rebuffs stymieing needed progress. You want a genuine Community of Practice, not a ghost town intranet site or a newsletter with a 12% open rate. You seek a living, breathing network where people actually help each other get better at what they do, and you needed it yesterday.
Before you can build a community of practice, you must understand what a real community requires. Mandating your way to communities, via command-n-control methods, won’t work. However, prepping the environment, much like a farmer prepares the soil for what might be grown, will increase your odds of success.
That includes:
A Shared Survival Challenge
Communities don’t form because people like each other. They form because people need each other. What’s at stake if you don’t get better at this craft together? What problems are too big, too fast-moving, or too ambiguous for one team to solve alone? If your community isn’t anchored to a clear, shared challenge, it becomes a hobby group - or worse, the often-tried and failed company book club.
Time and Permission to Show Up
If it’s not on the roadmap, it’s not a priority. Side of the desk work is the first to fall on the floor when things get stressed. People can’t contribute to a community when they’re drowning in delivery work. Protect the time. Normalize participation. Make it part of the job, not a fit-it-in-when-you-can.
Recognition of the Right Work
Don’t just celebrate the people who give lightning talks or lead flashy demos. Recognize the folks who answer the same question ten times a month. The ones who fix the wiki. The ones who reach out to the new hire and say, “Hey, if you’re stuck, I’ve got time.” This is the invisible labor that keeps a community alive. This is the glue work.
We were taught to ignore the glue people.
Every healthy community, whether it is a software org, a rural town, or a tent city park, depends on a specific kind of person. It isn’t the visionary nor the rockstar. It is not the ninja nor the 10x developer.
It is the person who remembers birthdays. The person who answers questions without making you feel stupid. The person who nudges the conversation back to what matters. The person who makes sure the snacks are labeled and the new folks feel seen. These are the “glue people,” and modern software has been lying about their importance for some time.
In 2015, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt openly derided glue people. To him, the developers who wrote code and the product managers attached to them created a company’s value. The facilitators, translators, and maintainers of community, as well as everyone else who might be employed at a company, were a drag on velocity.
Of course, technology is quick to copy, and in the rush to scale like Google, too many tech leaders absorbed Schmidt’s contempt without questioning the context. And in doing so, they hollowed out their own organizations, devaluing the very people who made knowledge flow, prevented silos, and held relationships together across functions and teams. That mindset has been quietly devastating.
Want to know why your Community of Practice fizzled? Ask yourself who the glue person was and whether anyone supported them.
A real community doesn’t scale despite glue people. It scales because of them.
These are the people who do the emotional labor of culture maintenance; those who build bridges, hold memory, and sense when things are about to snap. They are the human infrastructure that makes knowledge work… work.
And yet, they are rarely promoted. Rarely rewarded. Often burned out and quietly exited, leaving behind a strangely brittle organization that doesn’t understand why things feel so much harder now.
We keep trying to automate connection, to platformize care, to metricize trust. But we won’t get anywhere until we recognize that the work of holding people together is work. It’s essential. And it’s worth protecting.
Do you even neighbor, bro?
I’ve been carrying a low-grade anxiety since the last election. It’s not just the headlines of the “no bottom” variety. It’s the increasing realization that systems like disaster response, weather forecasting, and even basic democratic stability are far more fragile than I’d care to believe.
I used to find comfort in social media activism. A petition signed here or a strongly worded email there felt like a great use of this unlimited, world-wide publishing machine we all have access to. However those were just tiny pixels washed out in the 4K, omnichannel blitz of reality.
Continuing with that token bare minimum feels hollow in our current situation. I still write my representatives. I still stay informed. The macro fight matters. But if this exercise in kleptocratic idiocracy has taught me anything, it’s that the micro matters, too.
Every day, the vast, vast majority of us occupy places other than Washington, D.C., or Silicon Valley. These are neighborhoods, schools, parks, slack channels, and even codebases. These are our fields, ones that we can fight for or choose to leave fallow.
That means practicing something smaller and slower. For me, that means inviting my kids’ friends and their parents over to roast hot dogs in the backyard. It means getting offline and going for walks with people I only know from profile pictures. I am trying to show up to things that aren’t optimized for efficiency - the small talk, the get-together in a park, even volunteering to help organize the local ultimate club.
These aren’t world-changing acts, but they are world-sustaining ones.
They’re an attempt to plant seeds of community - not for show, not for scale, but for resilience. For the hope that something unpredictable, wild, and new might grow. And when the storm comes, and it will come, I’ll know how to answer the call.
You don’t grow community with a business plan.
You grow it by being willing to plant, tend, and trust what you can’t control.
You grow it by showing up.
You grow it by growing up.
Especially when it’s inconvenient.
