Community is where APIs actually live or die, and it’s the part of the business that the spreadsheets and the architecture diagrams never quite capture. An API is a technical artifact, but an API platform is a community — the developers building on it, the people answering each other’s questions, the champions advocating for it inside their own companies, the practitioners sharing patterns across the broader industry. I’ve spent fifteen years in and around the API community, and the thing I keep coming back to is that the human side is the real side. The technology is necessary but it’s never sufficient. What determines whether an API succeeds is whether a community forms around it, and whether that community is treated as a partner or as a resource to be extracted from.
The most important early lesson I learned, and one I wrote about back in 2011, is that you build community by ceding control to it. The instinct of most API providers is to build everything themselves — the official client libraries, the official samples, the official everything. But the healthier move is to let the community innovate, to spotlight the developers who build code libraries and samples, to give them ownership and visibility. I described this as an organic approach to your ecosystem — gardening, not engineering. You don’t manufacture a community on a schedule; you create the conditions, plant things, tend them, and let the ecosystem grow in directions you didn’t fully plan. Showcasing developers and their applications wasn’t a marketing tactic; it was the core mechanism. When you put a developer’s work in the spotlight, you reward them, you grow their career, and you signal to everyone else that this is a community where contribution is seen and valued.
That’s where the idea of developer champions comes in — the “unicorns.” Every healthy API community has a small number of people who genuinely love the platform, who advocate for it without being paid to, who answer questions and write tutorials and show up. I wrote in 2011 about feeding the unicorns, nurturing those champions, because they’re disproportionately valuable and disproportionately fragile. A champion who feels used, ignored, or burned will quietly disappear, and you rarely get them back. The care and feeding of champions is one of the highest-leverage things a community-minded API program can do, and it’s almost never on anyone’s roadmap because it doesn’t fit neatly into a funnel.
The single clearest principle I’ve landed on about community building is the one I took from Twilio: be part of your community, do not just sell to it. The difference is everything. A vendor shows up at the meetup to pitch. A community member shows up to help, to listen, to contribute, and the business benefits flow from genuinely being there. The companies that built the strongest API communities — Twilio above all — understood that the community wasn’t a lead-generation channel. It was a place they belonged. The moment a community senses it’s being marketed to rather than participated in, the trust evaporates, and trust is the entire currency of community. I’ve written darker, satirical pieces about the opposite approach — extract as much value as you can from your community and give nothing back — precisely because that extractive pattern is so common and so corrosive.
The community shows up in physical and digital spaces, and those spaces matter. The infrastructure evolved over the years — forums on Get Satisfaction, then GitHub as the place community work happened, then Slack and Discord, with YouTube and blogs and Stack Overflow woven through. But the events were where the API community really cohered. API Craft, which Apigee started as a self-organized Google Group and a series of local meetups, was a genuine community space — people sharing and developing knowledge in the open, online and over beers at OSCON. APIStrat, which began as an Apigee and 3Scale initiative and eventually became part of the OpenAPI Initiative under the Linux Foundation, became the place the key API conversations happened. API Days built the same thing globally. These weren’t just conferences; they were the connective tissue of a practitioner community, the place where the people doing this work found each other and discovered they weren’t alone. I’ve said many times that the community saved me — there were hard stretches where the people in this community were what kept me going.
Beyond any single platform’s community, there’s the broader API community — the practitioners, the toolmakers, the standards contributors, the people who collectively move the whole space forward. This is where community becomes a kind of commons. The OpenAPI and AsyncAPI communities are self-organizing communities of practice building shared standards in the open, with governance, special interest groups, working meetings, and contribution processes. What we do in this community influences how the rest of the world makes change — the storytelling and patterns that emerge from the API community ripple out into government, into enterprises, into how the entire economy integrates. That’s a real responsibility, and I’ve never taken it lightly. The API community has always been small enough that individual people and individual choices mattered to its character.
There’s a hard-headed business case underneath all of this, too, and I don’t want to romanticize community to the point of obscuring it. Community is a moat. The platforms that invested real money in their communities — the Slack Fund, AWS grants, the Amazon Alexa Fund, even small funds like MailChimp’s — understood that a thriving developer community is both a signal of health and a genuine competitive advantage. Network effects in an API platform are community effects. The developers, the integrations, the shared knowledge, the third-party tools — that accumulated ecosystem is far harder for a competitor to replicate than any feature. Investing in community isn’t charity; it’s one of the most durable business investments an API platform can make. But the investment only works if it’s genuine, because communities can smell the difference between investment and manipulation.
I’d be dishonest if I didn’t talk about the decline and the harder realities, because they’re central to the role community plays. Communities can be enclosed and betrayed — Twitter built one of the great developer communities and then systematically dismantled it, revoking access, competing with the developers who’d built on it, breaking the trust that took years to build. I’ve written about looking back at Twitter’s community to understand how to rebuild better with something like Bluesky, because the rise and fall of that community is the canonical lesson in how platform power can destroy what community creates. The broader API community has also struggled with scale and fatigue — the veterans get tired, the space gets more commercial, vendors consolidate, and the grassroots energy that defined the early years gets harder to sustain. I’ve felt that fatigue myself. The community is not automatically self-sustaining; it requires people to keep showing up and tending it, and that labor is real and often invisible.
What it all comes down to is that I’ve come to believe community is the most important and most undervalued part of the API equation — important enough that I took on the role of Chief Community Officer because I think the next chapter of this work is fundamentally about people, not just specifications and tooling. The role of community in APIs is to be the thing that makes the technology matter. A perfect API with no community is a tree falling in an empty forest. A decent API with a thriving, well-treated community will outperform it every time. Community is where adoption happens, where feedback comes from, where champions emerge, where standards get built, where trust accumulates, and where the human reality of this work actually lives. Treat the community as a partner and a commons to be stewarded, not a resource to be extracted, and almost everything else in the business of APIs gets easier. Treat it as a marketing channel, and you’ll watch it quietly walk away.
References
- Showcase Your API Developers And Their Applications
- Please Feed The Unicorns: Nurturing Developer Champions
- An Organic Approach To Your API Ecosystem
- Definition Of API Craft
- What We Do In The API Community Influences How The Rest Of The World Is Making Change
- Investing In Your API Community Like Amazon And Slack
- Be Part Of Your Community, Do Not Just Sell To It
- Maintaining The API Community At Scale (APIStrat)
- The OpenAPI Community
- Looking Back To Understand The Future Of The Bluesky Community
- I Will Be Joining Naftiko As The Chief Community Officer
