Open Source Summit North America 2022

dbt began as an open source project in 2016 with an ambitious goal: enable a new generation of data professionals to work together through code first workflows, CI/CD and version control. dbt soon became part of every data developers toolkit, and community emerged around the technology – a community of humans who call themselves analytics engineers. Today, this dbt Community includes 25,000 Slack group members, events in 8 countries, and connects annually at the Coalesce conference (7,000 attendees in 2021). The dbt Community is well known in open source data tooling circles as a friendly, human space that helps folks build strong connections. How do we keep this spirit alive as we scale past 25K humans? How do we make sure we retain a human first space when over 9,000 companies now use dbt daily? This talk will run through a brief history of the community and principles it was built on and then spend the majority of the time digging into practical things we've tried, what worked and what didn't and why. We'll talk about different modalities (e.g. Slack, Discourse and other platforms), how communities change as they grow globally, keeping the group in touch with its values when you can no longer moderate every message and empowering the community to self-govern.