How does dbt Labs approach building and scaling its open-source community, and is it different from other open-source community-building strategies?

The founding story of dbt Labs is well-documented. We were a consultancy before we were a software company and our founders, Tristan, Drew, and Connor, created the Slack community to talk with their clients. It was a forum where they could have conversations around the practice of data analytics, or be friendly and chat about some of the things that they were working on. 

It slowly started to grow as this hub where people came to get help, learn, teach, socialize, share. It grew over time in a really authentic way. If you go into the dbt community Slack today, you see a lot of people asking questions to get help with dbt. But more than that, people are having conversations about the industry, new technologies, their work, how to manage teams. It's become this watering hole where people go to learn, ask questions, and even just catch up with their friends. 

A majority of conversations happen in DMs. I have this direct line to pretty much anyone in the data community where if they want to get in touch with me, they can, not on LinkedIn, but on dbt Slack. They'll just send me a DM and I meet a lot of people that way. 

We now have over 30,000 people in dbt Slack. But we work hard to make it feel small so that you can get the same interesting conversations that you could with a smaller audience. We do a lot to keep that spark. We organize channels around topics of conversation. We have champions of channels, sometimes light moderation, and we try to keep the general tone and feeling of the community very positive and optimistic, because that's what we stand for. And we also have other outlets for the community that don't evolve around Slack—It's meetups, conferences, and Twitter communities too—all about dbt.

dbt Labs is a very long term-focused company, so, we want to make sure that it doesn't ever feel like you go to that Slack and are being sold something, either by us or by other vendors that are in the Slack group as well. We hope that if we can continue to create a great place for people to talk about data and deliver great products, then it will all compound over the long-term.