Community management as a service

Every entrepreneur starts by turning a passion into a mission statement. Successful entrepreneurs leverage their knowledge and experience into a service that they can provide to organizations.

We recently interviewed one entrepreneur who has done just that. Jason Hibbets is the owner of Soul Surfer Consulting, where he uses his marketing and community experience "at the intersection of open source communities and marketing." We asked Jason about the role of the community manager and how he helps organizations in this space.

Let's start with an introduction. Who are you, and what do you do?

Hello, I’m Jason Hibbets, owner at Soul Surfer Consulting and managing editor for the We Love Open Source education hub by All Things Open. My company, Soul Surfer Consulting, focuses on marketing and events consulting. More specifically, I specialize in content marketing, user-generated content, and community management. My ideal client is someone working on cool and interesting things, looking for project-based work that taps into my expertise.

When I started the company, I wasn’t quite sure where the opportunities might land me, so I kept my service descriptions more broad, until I had a better understanding of what would resonate with clients. In retrospect, this was the right approach for me. It just took time to talk to folks in my network and get a better understanding of what type of work people needed help with and what the demand was for my service offerings. 

How and why did you start Soul Surfer Consulting?

I started my business out of necessity. I landed a one-year contract with a client and wanted to get an LLC set up to help separate and protect my personal assets from the business. The State of North Carolina makes it very easy to set up and start a business. I actually ran my own web design company in the early 2000’s, so I just had a dust a few cobwebs off. 

I gained 20 years of marketing and community experience with my time at Red Hat. The universe decided it was time for me to share this mountain of knowledge at the intersection of open source communities and marketing with others, and Soul Surfer Consulting was born in January of 2024. 

The other important component to all of this is that I had a life changing epiphany about how I want to spend my time and “retirement.” I decided that I wanted to be in control of how I spend my time, and having my own business was an ideal solution to readjusting my trajectory to earlier retirement. If you're familiar with the movement Financial Independence Retire Early (FIRE), I am all about this!

Part of the "content marketing" at Soul Surfer draws on your background in technical writing and technical editing.  What was your job as a technical writer and editor? 

At a very high level, the role of a technical writer and editor is to accurately prepare technical content for readers. More specifically, I work on technical blog posts, tutorials, and video interviews. Having a background in programming and open source is helpful when editing, because I either understand what the author is describing or know when to ask questions or get clarification.

Running a technology-focused blog that involves open source and community-generated content, complicates what a typical day might look like. If I were working on product documentation with an engineering team, a technical writers day might be more standard. However, running a blog is more like working in organized chaos. The community keeps things dynamic, but the editorial calendar and Kanban boards help to keep us organized.

I sort of live in the future, because the average week for me involves looking to the weeks and months ahead. I’m planning, reviewing, editing, and entering content that won’t be published for a week or two, sometimes longer. Once content is prepared, this involves blog posts, podcast interviews, and video shorts, it gets a final review before its scheduled to publish. Once the week ahead is scheduled and ready, I share the editorial calendar with the rest of the team for social media, newsletters, etc. 

You also work in community management. What is the community manager role?

The role of community manager can vary widely depending on the individual, the organization, and the desired outcomes. You might be familiar with other similar job titles such as Developer Advocate, Developer Evangelist, or Technical Evangelist. As I progressed through my career, I started as a community manager. My role was to “go get great content” and build relationships for our open source community.

For me, this involved many of the technical editing skills previously mentioned. But it also involved activities such as attending technical conferences and meet-ups, delivering presentations, and most importantly, elevating the work from our community and being a big megaphone for them.

The community manager role also came with tasks like updating our executive sponsors on what we were doing, how we were planning to measure success, and sharing our community wins. It also involved being an internal advocate for the project and sharing ways that people could get involved and spread the word.

As my role changed into a Community Architect and eventually Community Director, I saw more project-based, administrivia, and managerial-type work. I was designing community programs, creating structured ways for community members to join, and advance their involvement. We needed to track all of these activities, create reports, and communicate our progress to management. I also started mentoring other community managers on my team.

Community management still feels like an elusive role that typical “management” doesn’t understand. Hopefully, this gives you some insights into what type of activities community managers might be tasked with in their role. 

You helped establish We Love Open Source. Tell us about that experience.

Let me share the story about the We Love Open Source educational hub and how it started. I was approached by the All Things Open team, the folks that run an amazing technology conference in Raleigh, NC attracting more than 5,000 attendees in addition to standing-room only monthly meet-ups. They wanted to grow the community and find ways to keep the momentum from the October conference going all year long. They just needed someone with experience to execute and accelerate the project.

That’s when I joined the All Things Open team in early 2024 and started helping launch the We Love Open Source educational hub. The design and web team were working hard to get everything prepared on the WordPress site. This included front end design work and back end workflows, while I was getting content and inviting a few folks to be early adopters and contributors.

The reason we were doing all this work was the reason I joined the team. The All Things Open community had been asking for this for years, a place to share their knowledge with the community and conference attendees. The timing was right and we slowly started publishing community-generated content in April 2024.

Fast-forward about nine months later, we are consistently publishing content five days a week, adding new contributors each month, and we captured almost 40 interviews in the We Love Open Source studio in October. Our most popular content is getting thousands of page views and we started a new email newsletter late 2024 just dedicated to We Love Open Source podcast interviews, tutorials, and articles. Check out the Fist Bump Friday and get subscribed if you haven’t already. 

And the most important take-away from this is that we accept contributions from the community. The entire blog would not be possible without our amazing network of authors and world-class speakers, who graciously share their knowledge, leadership, and experiences.