HashiCorp Senior Community Manager Katie Reese (Twitter) leads HashiCorp User Groups a.k.a. HUGs, a 138-chapter—and growing—Meetup Pro network. Over the last three years, Katie has been focusing on empowering HUG organizers, building strong relationships at the chapter level, and striving to be a resource and liaison of HashiCorp to each organizer and their local communities.
HashiCorp, a leading developer of cloud infrastructure automation tools, sees the HashiCorp User Group community as an extension of its company principles—kindness, humility, and pragmatism, to name a few.
Community is the cornerstone of HashiCorp. Everything starts with the practitioner’s experience with the community and HashiCorp OSS tools.
Katie Reese, HashiCorp Senior Community Manager
How HashiCorp creates community
Starting in 2015 with the Amsterdam HUG, the HashiCorp User Group network now has chapters in 48 countries. HashiCorp leverages Meetup Pro to unite its global HUG chapters and manage content and communication in one place. Katie and her team credit Meetup Pro’s analytics functionality as critical to measuring the efforts of their local organizers.
Meetup Pro enables HashiCorp to give back to its community leaders. “We cover each chapter’s fee and we are happy to plug them in with local HashiCorp leaders for virtual and in-person speaking opportunities. Additionally, we release many of our other community programs to them before the community at large such as the HashiTalks CFP, HashiCorp scholarship applications, and HashiCorp ambassador nominations,” Katie added.
All chapters have a common goal of community-building and knowledge-sharing. HashiCorp’s Developer Advocates are also a huge help in this regard. They are eager to speak at HUG events and answer any technical questions from their local communities. Katie added, “a chapter is successful if they have a regular cadence of hosting events. This consistency is a key indicator of an organizer’s success in building a community organically.”
According to Ms. Reese, the value is theirs to create, own, and benefit from. “HUG organizers come to us seeking an opportunity to own the conversation in their local communities and share their knowledge around HashiCorp tools and benefit from the network they create.” Ms. Reese sees herself as a resource to the HUG organizers, especially if they’re seeking a great speaker or feedback on building content around the latest release.
Our HUG organizers take such pride in their role because of their ability to drive the local conversation as it pertains to HashiCorp tooling, and we’re here to support them in becoming local thought leaders.
Katie Reese, HashiCorp Senior Community Manager
Community-building continues online
The HUG network has pivoted to online events during the COVID-19 crisis to keep up with the demand for events from the community. “We encourage organizers to host virtual events and will continue to do so even when we are able to meet up in person again,” said Katie. “While in-person events are obviously extremely important and valuable, our organizers are finding that virtual events can be great as well and that they lower the barrier to participation.” HashiCorp’s community forum HUG thread, which features their HUG Organizer Quick Start Guide, is a “source of truth” for the community and includes resources such as official slide decks to help Meetup organizers and speakers host a successful event under virtually any circumstance.
About HashiCorp
HashiCorp is the leader in infrastructure automation for multi-cloud environments. We are building solutions that enable innovation at global enterprises, offering them a common cloud operating model via consistent workflows to provision, secure, connect, and run their infrastructure with any application. All our foundational technologies are open source and developed openly, and have been since our founding.
HashiCorp was founded in 2012 and is headquartered in San Francisco, though 85 percent of our employees work remotely, strategically distributed around the globe. From our inception, we built the company with a remote-first approach because we believe talent has no boundaries.
Last modified on June 23, 2021
