I didn’t start in tech. I spent eleven years in healthcare, talking with patients and their families, working alongside doctors and nurses, and learning something that has shaped everything I’ve done since: people need to feel heard before they can move forward.

That sounds simple, but it’s the kind of simple that can easily be forgotten.

In healthcare I learned to meet people where they were. A patient’s family wants to feel cared about, a surgeon doesn’t need to understand computer file systems, they need to know how to save lives. I have always seen my job as figuring out what people need and help them get it. The setting may have changed, but the work didn’t.

When I moved into tech and started building communities, I found a lot of communities were being built backwards. People were building for themselves, making decisions based on what they wanted rather than focusing on serving their users. Simple things like getting too clever with naming, calling forums “conversations”and blogs “stories” and then wondering why nobody could find anything.

A community isn’t a marketing channel. It’s not a funnel. It’s not an engagement metric on a dashboard. A community is an enablement resource. It exists to help people do their best work and live their best lives. When the goal shifts from helping people to extracting value from them, the community stops being a community. I don’t even call it lurking when people visit my community and don’t post. I call it gleaning. They came, they found what they needed, and they left. That’s a win. Not everyone needs to raise their hand. Some people get value by reading a knowledge base article at 2 AM, others get value by finding how others solve problems similar to theirs. Everyone has their own reasons to be part of a community, and they are all valid..

I think the reason this matters so much to me is personal. I’m the father of special needs children, and I have ADHD. I’ve worked in a variety of places and industries, from being elbow-deep in dish soap at a remote fishing lodge in Alaska to removing viruses from a grandmas computer so she could see the pictures of her grandkids again. Every one of my experiences taught me the same thing: we do better when we’re not alone. Not for someone to tell us what to do, but because we all need someone to be there for us. Listening. Sharing a bit  of themselves, and offering a hand without assuming we need to be pulled.

There’s a metaphor I keep coming back to. Rope. A single strand of string is useful, and can completely fulfill a multitude of functions, but multiple strands together become stronger than the sum of its parts. That’s what a community does. It takes individual people, each with their own experiences and perspectives and skills, and weaves them into something stronger.

That’s why I keep building them. Not because I have all the answers, but because I’ve seen what happens when people have a place to show up, be heard, and help each other.

That’s a community. It’s worth the effort, every time.