Look into hiring a community manager.

[shaunagm]

Here are some things that a community manager might do:

• manage an Econ-Ark blog, including writing some posts and soliciting posts from community members
• creating and posting to social media accounts
• working with NumFocus to arrange for in-person events around conferences
• possibly helping to plan a small conference/meetup for Econ-Ark/open source economics software
• scheduling regular calls/meetups for contributors, users, and peers (aka other users of open source economics software)
• helping with documentation/information by keeping track of common questions/confusions that community members have
• welcome new contributors/users and help connect them to project members as needed
• help plan sprints (would likely need training from SGM for this)
• it's possible a community manager could be a significant part of any training efforts we engage in

[llorracc]

Preparing for the CEF meeting with other open source developers made me realize that there are a lot of ways that the people I'm interacting there are a community that could benefit enormously from a community manager. I can think of several specific tasks:

1. Constructing mechanisms for developers to keep tabs on what others are doing (and have done)
2. Collaborating on technologies (like open standards) that allow exchange of work and results,
3. Organizing get-togethers at events like the CEF and SciPy conferences
4. Exchanging information about how to find or hire talented people to contribute

[Dr-G]

Hi folks,

Just to tack on: NumFOCUS can manage the logistics for a dedicated conference if it's held in conjunction with PyData NYC 2020 (probably November). If that is of interest, you could include our event management service fee in the Sloan grant.

A community manager would be useful to work on community management and getting folks to attend the conference (i.e. marketing the event).

[shaunagm]

@Dr-G, do you have any sense of what size conference we should be thinking about here?

[Dr-G]

For your first event, probably keep it to around 250.

Do you have a venue in mind? If so, what attendance would it accommodate?