From 8e2bcbb60374a080c3e3c2c25042a585460a3773 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Dave Josephsen Date: Tue, 8 Sep 2015 12:58:55 -0500 Subject: [PATCH] first pass at a "wtf wade" page --- _posts/about.markdown | 74 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 74 insertions(+) create mode 100644 _posts/about.markdown diff --git a/_posts/about.markdown b/_posts/about.markdown new file mode 100644 index 0000000..60cad79 --- /dev/null +++ b/_posts/about.markdown @@ -0,0 +1,74 @@ +## Why WADE? +WADE was created to be a side-channel for technical advocates, evangelists and +organizers. Generally, we aim to be a place you could go with questions like: + +* "Hey, who all is going to be at Monitorama next month?" +* "What's the best place to buy t-shirts that fit people?" +* "Does anyone want to co-sponsor a hackathon two days before Velocity?" +* "Our Meetup Venue just burned down. Can anyone in Portland host 35 pyladies on short notice?" +* "What's the best non-liquid (eg pack-able) laundry detergent that works well on colors in hotel sinks?" +* "Hello vendors that compete with me, do you want to sit on a panel together at Strangeloop?" +* "What sticker design is working best for you right now?" +* "I find myself in Chicago and in want of lunch. Anybody hungry?" +* "Anybody want a job?" +* "Where can I ship a Parka general post in Vancouver?" + +Questions like those get asked and answered every day in WADE, along with a lot +of general conversation about advocacy and community management and just plain +palling around. Developer evangelism and advocacy are relatively new roles, so +in parallel to the community organization activity, a lot of what goes on in +WADE is practitioners figuring out what their own roles mean or how to navigate +making them work in a new place. What are your quarterly goals as a developer +evangelist? How much do you travel as an advocate? What is your corporate +conference strategy (booths and sponsored talks? or CFP's and prayers?), to +what extent to you copy-edit your blog content, etc..etc... + +## Who can Join? +Our members are generally professionals with the words 'community', 'advocate', +or 'evangelist' in their titles. Organizationally, we usually fall someplace +beneath "Product" on the org chart. Right now looking at the active membership, +we consist mostly of community and event organizers. Many of our members have a +different day job, but organize conferences and/or meetups on the side. We have +several others who are students or who do something else professionally and are +trying to decide if they're interested in switching roles. + +One thing we have in common is that we orbit software engineering, and directly +interact with software engineers on a regular basis. We organize events for +software engineers, educate software engineers, take action to smooth +integration headaches for software engineers, and even perform anthropology on +software engineers in order to extract and tell an interesting story to other +software engineers. + +Many of us are, or have been engineers, but at least as many others aren't and +haven't been engineers. Unlike many engineers however, we aren't bewitched by +technical aptitude, and don't expect or require that you "code" or anything +like that. We happily help each other grow in myriad ways because community and +advocacy are harder than computers, and require a far wider range of expertise. + +Another thing we have in common is that we're generally incentivized to be +cooperative, by which I mean we're very comfortable interacting with, and +exchanging information with our contemporaries at competing organizations, and +being open about the deficiencies in the technology we advocate compared to +competing technology. Despite the religious overtones implied by words like +"evangelism", our professional success is inseparable from our credibility and +especially among software engineers, our credibility rests on candor, +generosity, and sincerity. + +## Who can't join? +We've turned down a few membership requests from folks in positions like sales, +marketing, and venture capitalism. It's nothing personal, and we don't have +anything against those things, but we feel that it's important for us to +maintain a certain... simplicity of intention among our members. At the +moment WADE is genuinely useful as a means of creating ad-hoc dialog between +community and advocacy people in a wide range of organizations, and for that to +continue and grow, we need to make sure that all of our members are cooperative +in nature and both willing and able to help each other out. + +That said, we're still figuring out what WADE is and what it could be, so by +all means if you're coming from a marketing or sales or whatever angle, and you +believe that we can help each other, send us an invite request and talk to us. + +## Welcome! +I guess the TLDR; is that WADE is a place where community, event, and advocacy +people can learn from each other, network, and grow. If that sounds +interesting to you, we'd love to have you join us!