How to Engage a Community

With Elixir now in its sixth year (albeit with decades of Erlang behind it), it should be no surprise that the train keeps on chugging. From the increasing list of Meetup groups to the number of Elixir conferences, it’s clear that this community is engaged and growing.

There are now over 200 Elixir meetups worldwide.

Elixir Meetups (https://www.meetup.com/topics/elixir/)

In 2014, there was one Elixir conference.

In 2015, there were two Elixir conferences.

In 2016, the list grew to six.

In 2017, the community supported seven Elixir-specific conferences. Erlang Factory changed their name to Erlang and Elixir Factory — reflecting the growing presence of the Elixir community.

ElixirConf 2017

Every year has been a year of growth as Elixir continues to make an appearance on lists of languages to learn in the new year. If you’ve been sitting on the outskirts of the community thinking about diving in, we can’t recommend it enough.

There are so many ways to take part in 2018.

From chatting on Slack to meeting in-person at meetups and conferences, we all have an opportunity to be an active participant.

You could give a talk at your local meetup. You could answer questions on the community Slack. You could give a talk at one of the several conferences. It all can start by writing a blog article about Elixir.

In 2017, Echobind increased the time and resources put into Elixir. The majority of our APIs are now built on this platform. We attended four of the major Elixir conferences — speaking at ElixirConf and Elixir with Love. We have written a number of blog posts on Elixir and given talks at meetups as well. We’re happy to be organizers of Elixir meetups in Boston and Louisville, KY.

In 2018, we’ll continue doing more of the same. We’ll also be doing a webinar on Elixir deployments — Beyond Heroku: Deploying your Phoenix Application.

How will you engage the community in 2018?