Enabling Local Community Chapters with Jan de Vries

Today, we’re joined by Jan de Vries, Senior Community Engagement Manager at Mendix, an application development platform in a market called low code. It makes it easy for people to create apps visually instead of having to write code all day. You can just drag and drop, which makes it much more accessible, easier, and faster to build applications.

It’s important for people to connect not just digitally but in person as well. Start by organizing the small group of people around you, understand them and their goals, and organize meetups with key people in the community. The eventual goal is to turn into a facilitator where you just share the plans and processes for other people to self-organize and conduct events. Make everything easily accessible so meetups can be done without attachment to specific time zones.

Go to these meetups, connect with attendees, understand what they do in the industry and what brings them to the events.

Find people or groups of people who can regularly conduct events. Help them adopt a group-learning mindset which is at the heart of building highly engaged communities.