In the open source data space, having a friendly and engaged community behind your product is almost table stakes today. But encouraging those community members to advocate for the product is a challenge on its own. People aren’t going to promote something just because they’ve been asked to do so, they need to feel a deep affinity for it. If the community becomes part of their identity and who they are, it will be hard to stop them spreading the word!

For the last decade, Karin has been building programs that turn the most engaged users into advocates, building healthy communities for companies like Neo4j, a graph database community, and then at StarTree, a real-time analytics platform.

In this talk, Karin will cover strategies and tactics on how to build a program to encourage your users to advocate and how to do it at scale. She draws on her time working with artists such as Eminem to share the things that have worked (and those that haven’t!) and offers key takeaways that you can use to build your own community of advocates.