Five years later, this goal continues to drive everything we do. With new team members joining us, it’s the perfect time to reintroduce ourselves and share our vision. As our team and community have grown, we’re excited to keep fostering a space where knowledge, collaboration, and innovation thrive!

Our community vision

Our vision for the community is simple: it’s all about you, our passionate Camunda users. You’re dedicated to process orchestration excellence and eager to share your insights! Your feedback helps us create a better experience, and the knowledge you share with fellow users helps everyone gain more value.

By creating platforms for you to ask questions, discuss best practices, suggest feedback, and share community-maintained extensions, we connect you to other community members, enhancing the collective learning and growth.

The community programs launched in the last few years, including Champions, Educational License Program and so many more, have empowered you with additional resources, conversations with other Camundi, and early access to product features.

What does this mean on a practical level? For 2024, we’re focused on three key areas:

• Technical Awareness – Through videos, blog posts, talks, and sample code, we aim to help the broader technical community understand process orchestration and the problems it can solve for them.
• User Enablement – Our goal is to help you succeed with Camunda through community platforms, programs, and technical content. We also often support you in creating your own content or helping your fellow community members in the forum!
• Community Growth – While focusing on those of you who are already engaged with us through meet-ups, forum posts, and code contributions (hi!), we also want to attract new community members so that we can all benefit from greater collective knowledge about process orchestration.

The journey so far

Over the past five years, our community has grown and transformed. We’ve expanded, iterated on, and launched various platforms and programs to better support and connect Camunda users. Our forum has become a hub for troubleshooting and sharing knowledge, while our volunteer-run meet-ups continue to offer opportunities to learn and network.

With a little bit of structure and a clear goal, we’ve been able to partner with you to bring even more programs into existence. Here are a few highlights:

• With Camunda’s German roots, we couldn’t overlook Hacktoberfest and its play on words for Oktoberfest. We first participated in October 2020 and have received amazing community contributions to our core products as well as community-maintained repositories ever since.
• January 2021 brought the announcement of Camunda for Common Good, one of Camunda’s philanthropic programs. Qualifying NGOs and nonprofits benefit from access to an enterprise license completely free of charge in an effort to further their mission.
• Our first public commits to the Camunda Community Hub were in March 2021. This GitHub organization collects community-maintained repos in a single place, allowing for easier access to tools that can get you up and running more quickly.
• In April 2021 we hosted our very first Community Summit, geared specifically toward developers, enterprise architects, and process automation experts. We introduced the idea of an “unconference” which was incredibly well-received and has continued to be a part of our in-person CamundaCon events. Join us in NYC in October to participate in the next one!
• The Camunda Champion Program, which supports our most engaged community members, was launched in June 2021. To date, we’ve welcomed 47 different Champions to the program, many of whom have renewed their Champion status every year. Interested in joining this exclusive group? We’re preparing to open applications for our sixth cohort in August!
• Our Community Values were launched with the help of our Camunda Champions in November 2022. These values have become a “north star” for the programs we run and the platforms we oversee, ensuring we continue to be transparent and accountable for our actions, and orchestrate with heart.
• While we’ve been giving guest lectures at universities for years, the Educational License Program was made official in January 2023. Through this program, we give special access to Camunda for university professors who want to teach BPMN or Camunda in their class, or graduate students who want to use Camunda for their thesis. To date, we’ve worked with more than 90 universities from 25 different countries and supported over 750 students!
• In May 2023, Senior Developer Advocate Niall Deehan recognized we needed a more formalized internal feedback loop to pass along all of the wonderful feedback you give us. With a few rounds of iteration, he came up with a simple process that has resulted in more than 80 pieces of feedback handed over to the product management team alone in the past year. Even more exciting, over 50% of those items have made significant progress through the roadmap!
• The Orchestration Hour was created in May 2023 to give us a more interactive way to test out ideas, try new Camunda features, and learn out loud with all of you. We’re exploring new ideas for segments, like the recent “BPMN Battle” episode, so let us know what you want to see!
• We partnered with Marketing to re-launch the much anticipated Camunda Community Podcast in July 2023, interviewing Camunda Engineers and Product Managers in addition to community members to learn all the best tips and tricks.
• The Camunda forum has been around since 2016, providing a place for Camunda users to have discussions, offer feedback, and troubleshoot issues. Throughout 2023, we consolidated and cleaned up the categories and tags in the forum to make it easier to navigate and find the answers you’re looking for.
• We published our first Community Impact Report in January 2024, looking back on an amazing year of contributions, collaborations, content, and more.
• Through all of these additional platforms and programs, we’ve maintained our Camunda meet-up program, now renamed Camunda Chapters. As of July 2024, we have 36 active chapters across 19 countries, all run by amazing volunteers (thank you!).

We continue to produce a wide range of content in various formats. Whether you prefer YouTube videos, blog posts, podcast episodes, sample code, or in-person events, we’ve got you covered!

In the future, we have dreams of expanding the Champion program to include “internal Champions” – folks who contribute heavily to their organization’s success with Camunda but aren’t creating as much external content, creating a guest blogging program for you to share your process orchestration stories, and so much more!

The “Dream Team” behind the Camunda Community

I have the pleasure of leading an absolute dream team of individuals who are making our community vision a reality! Our team of Developer Advocates focuses on technical content for both developers who use and maintain Camunda instances and Enterprise Architects who guide the technical decisions behind a company’s digital transformation.

We also formed a strong community-focused team responsible for enhancing contributor experiences and managing community programs. They also track behind-the-scenes metrics so we can better understand what resources would be useful for you in the future.

Danielle Andrist – Community Growth Manager Joined in March 2020. Data explorer, organization junkie, reformatting fanatic, bad joke teller.
Jacob Plicque – Senior Developer Advocate Joined in June 2024. Storyteller, loud ridiculous hype-man, doggo dad, dice dragon.
Maria Alcantara – Senior Community Manager Joined in July 2021. Modern nomad, enthusiastic runner, yogi, climber, artist, and passionate creator of communities.
Mary Thengvall – Director of Developer Relations Joined in December 2019. Lover of dogs, cheese, live music, community gatherings, and living in the mountains.
Mia Moore – Senior Technical Community Builder Joined in June 2022. Big fan of birds, vegan food, and video games.
Nathan Loding – Developer Advocate Joined in January 2023. Technologist and problem solver, sometimes gardener, and Oreo enthusiast. Known to wear balloon hats in public.
Niall Deehan – Senior Developer Advocate Joined in April 2015. Maker of tutorials, teller of stories, keeper of secrets, and builder of unmaintainable example projects.
Samantha Holstine – Developer Advocate Joined in September 2023. Dancing and rowing enthusiast, corgi mom, foodie, nature junkie.

Feedback welcome!

Above all else, we are motivated to do work that makes a difference for you! While we draw conclusions from forum themes, popular features, and one-on-one conversations, we’d love even more feedback.

• What questions can we answer?
• What resources are you looking for?
• What problems are you trying to solve?
• What features would you like to see?

Our goal is to empower you to do your best work. Head to the forum to let us know how we can help!

—Mary, on behalf of the DevRel Dream Team

The post DevRel “Dream Team”—How we Empower Camunda Users appeared first on Camunda.

I recently faced this predicament on my own team here at Camunda. I needed to not only help my team decide which projects to prioritize but also help our coworkers understand how (and why) we respond to new requests.

While I could have written and published an internal strategy doc that listed our reasoning, information overload sets in quickly, and I’d rather not ask Camunda employees (Camundi) to read yet another page in our internal wiki every time they have a request. Instead, I turned to DMN and Camunda Platform 8’s new features to build a process model with an integrated form. While it’s not yet perfect, it’s already benefiting my team! How did I get here?

Step 1: Identify the criteria for prioritization

I chose to start with a DMN table, which would be the foundation of the model. Before I could build this table, however, I had to identify the criteria we would use to prioritize the DevRel team’s work. Many DevRel teams prioritize tasks based on impact on the developer community, alignment with the company’s goals, or level of effort.

In our case, the assumption is that the work being submitted to this form is independent of the projects we’ve already taken on as a team for the quarter. This allowed me to keep our criteria simple: alignment with the team goals and the urgency of the task.

Step 2: Create a decision table

With this criteria defined, it’s time to create the DMN table. These tables map the input values (timing and goals) to the output value (priority) based on a set of rules. A nice perk of building the prioritization rules into this table is that as our criteria change over time, I can update the table and the new rules will take effect immediately. Because the table is versioned, I can revert to a previous iteration at any time if necessary.

The first thing I had to define was the input data which the decision table will use to process requests. In my case, I used the following:

• Input: 2023 Goals
• Expression: goals
• Type: string
• Predefined Values: “healthy C8 community” “successful C8 community” “C8 community onboarding” “other”

Note: While filling in predefined values is optional, I found it helpful when populating the decision rules.

I set the second input (Timing) with fairly general ranges: this week, month, or quarter, and next week, month, or quarter, as well as no specific timeframe.

I kept the output value very straightforward: yes or no, with a possible exception that could be raised to me if necessary. Lastly, I’ve used the hit policy “first” in order to evaluate the rules from top to bottom and stop when a match is found.

The end result is a decision matrix that allows us to easily filter company requests that meet these specific goals and aren’t urgent (e.g. can be completed this month, next month, or next quarter). For anything that falls into the “this week” or “next week” timing, it’s likely going to be a no, unless it’s a very high-priority task that also aligns with our goals; in this case, the request is  flagged as a possible exception in need of review. The outcome is a fairly straightforward model that outlines when we can prioritize requests and when we’ll need to either reconsider them at a later time or simply say no.

Step 3: Create a form to populate the decision table

I repurposed a simple Google form we’ve used for years, using the Camunda Form Builder so I could integrate it with my decision table.

Once the form was created, I made sure the key for the questions around the goals and the timing matched up with the expression in my DMN table.

Step 4: Integrate the form and decision table into a process model

An idea is submitted & evaluated

The next step was to create a process model using Web Modeler. This model represents the process of prioritizing tasks, including collecting the criteria via the form, applying the decision table to determine the priority of the task, and communicating the decision to the appropriate Camundi. Let’s take a look at the current model:

The first section of the model includes the completion of the form, the DMN table which helps us prioritize the task, and an automated Slack message (using our Slack Connector) that notifies the DevRel team a new request has been submitted.

I connected the form to the model by copying the JSON from the code editor in the form builder and pasting it into the properties panel of the user task “Complete DevRel Request Form.”

I then added a Business Rule task and connected it to the DMN table I created by associating the following fields:

• I copied the ID for the Decision from the Decision Requirements Diagram (DRD) view and pasted it in the Called Decision: Decision ID field for the Business Rule task.
• In the Result Variable field, I pasted the output name from my DMN table (abilityToHelp).

It was important to me to minimize blockers (including myself) for these requests and better enable my team to take action, so I wanted to make sure the entire team would be alerted whenever someone filled out the form. Using the Slack Connector, I set up an alert to go directly to our team channel.

The next iteration will include a link to the specific request, in addition to the results of the DMN table so it will be easy to see at a glance whether additional insight is needed.

The decision is validated

The next step in our process is to validate the decisions.

There are two decision gateways here:

• Do you need help making a decision? The DMN table will automatically determine this step, moving requests directly to Look at automated decision if the answer is a clear yes or no. If the answer from the DMN table is abilityToHelp = “possible exception,” it will be flagged and go the Escalate to Manager route.
• Do you agree with the decision? When I was first designing this process, our Community Manager Maria Alcantara made the excellent observation that there may be times when users disagree with the automated decision. If this is the case, requests should be escalated to the manager.

Right now, looking at the automated decision as well as making the decision are user tasks that have to be managed within Tasklist. If users need to escalate to manager in either case, they can type in a variable agree = false for the first question and doThing = false for the second. In the next iteration of this model, I’d like to have a Slack integration that allows us to say yes or no to both of these questions in order to move forward seamlessly.

The end result of all these decisions is that we have a clear path forward: we’re either going to tackle this project or not.

The outcome is communicated

Feedback loops are important to us at Camunda, so I wanted to make sure no matter what the decision was, there was a follow-up with the person who requested help.

Rather than listing every Camundi in the Requester DMN table, I chose to include variants of our team members’ names: first name and first + last name, in lowercase as well as camelcase, since DMN tables are case sensitive. The output is groupCamundi with either the value of devrelTeam or colleague.

These final tasks are all user tasks, but again, there are opportunities to include automation here:

• Create a Trello card in our task board based on the form.
• Send a refusal message to the individual who submitted the request.
• Notify the requester when the task is moved to the done column in our task board.

We could likely even turn the form into a Slack bot that then pings the appropriate team member. In short, there are all sorts of possible iterations here, which we’ll definitely explore as we roll this out company-wide.

Step 5: Be more productive

I have high hopes that this process model will continue to help us prioritize our work more effectively, ensuring we focus our efforts on the tasks that will have the greatest impact on our community members as well as Camunda company goals. Additionally, by streamlining the prioritization process, we are able to complete tasks more quickly and efficiently, improving our overall productivity.

While this prioritization of tasks might seem like a relatively small and perhaps insignificant issue compared to the other items on our plate, this DMN table, form, and process model will serve as the foundation for future team endeavors and resource-planning. Here’s to solving “mole hills” before they turn into mountains!

What have you created with Camunda lately? Let us know over in our forum. I’d love to hear how process models have made your day-to-day work easier!

The post Prioritizing Our DevRel Backlog with Form Builder, DMN, and a Process Model appeared first on Camunda.

#CamundaSummit is the best time to experience the collective creative and technical talent that makes up our community. Adding to our anticipation is our recently released Camunda Platform 8, which makes the promise of universal process orchestration at scale a reality. And this week’s Summit features the most varied and engaging agenda to date, with opening day featuring hands-on interactive workshops, day two setting up the return of our Camunda Community Unconference, where conference attendees selected the 12 sessions that are featured, and wrapping up our third and last day with two-dozen expert-led sessions.

So here are my tried-and-true recommendations for making the most of Camunda Community Summit.

1. Get reacquainted with the Camunda Conferences Slack channel 

Networking with Summit attendees is made easy through our Camunda Conferences Slack channel. If you’ve attended Summit or CamundaCon in the past, chances are you’re already a member of this Slack channel. Either way, take time to log into Camunda Conferences on Slack and say hello. Slack is also where you’ll have the opportunity to get technical help during the conference, pose questions to speakers, and more. 

2. Allow yourself to be free of distractions

You’re a part of this global Camunda community, and opportunities to learn from each other are too rare. Invest the time to engage in the Summit experience and get the most from the learning and development opportunities it presents. 

3. Set your personal Summit agenda

Both our Unconference and expert-led session agendas are packed with side-by-side sessions, and our schedule is built so you can readily navigate across tracks. You’ll get the most out of your time if you take note of your priority sessions in advance and mark them in your calendar. 

Some examples:

If you’re wanting to learn about microservices orchestration, don’t miss:

• Camunda Platform as Orchestrator of Microservices at Unconference
• Creditas: Orchestrating Hundreds of Microservices with Camunda

Ready to deep dive into Camunda Platform 8? We recommend:

• The Universal Process Orchestrator – What’s Here and What is Coming
• Goldman Sachs’ Enabling Technically Challenging Business Use Cases Using Camunda Platform and Camunda Cloud at Scale
• Using Camunda in Unique Ways
• Building a Workflow Engine Based on Stream Processing
• Camunda Platform 8 Release Webinar

Pro tip: expert-led sessions on day three will be recorded, so if two sessions that capture your interest are offered at the same time, you’ll have a chance to watch it later on.

4. Stick around!

We’ve booked a DJ for our post-Unconference networking session on Wednesday, April 27. We have some fun games lined up, so be sure to stay tuned.

We look forward to seeing you at #CamundaSummit this week; feel free to ask any questions in the Slack channel if we may be of assistance!

The post 4 Tips for Making the Most of Camunda Community Summit appeared first on Camunda.

We’re bringing our international community together again for #CamundaSummit, and we can’t wait to see you there! Join us on April 26 – 28 for our virtual, interactive conference exclusively for developers, enterprise architects, and process automation experts. Save your seat to connect with Camunda community members from all software disciplines, backgrounds, and corners of the world. 

These three days are designed to help you expand your Camunda knowledge, get a look inside our code, and engage in real-time conversations with the people who are building and expanding our products. No Camunda conference is complete without you, so be sure to read on about how you can help make this the best #CamundaSummit yet.

Learn with Us!

Our Expert Sessions agenda is now live for you to preview the enriching experience we have planned. Be among the first to see what experts from organizations like Fidelity, Intuit, Goldman Sachs, and more will share as well as take part in interactive workshops and deep-dive technical sessions about Camunda Platform 7 as well as Camunda Platform 8. Every bit of our agenda is designed to deliver master-level insights from those behind our products along with those who effectively use them across various industries. 

Camunda Community Summit 2022 Overview

April 26  – Code Studio

Start #CamundaSummit off by coding with us during our live Code Studio. Our Developer Advocates are working on interactive workshops with hands-on challenges to help you gain a better understanding of our products, and contribute your own code. 

We are offering two sessions and seats are limited, so please RSVP for the time slot that best suits your schedule as you register for Camunda Community Summit 2022.

April 27 – Unconference

Chat with other Camunda community members during our Unconference, designed by developers for developers and crowdsourced entirely from you. On this day, your thoughts and ideas will have the floor as there will be no formal speakers. Did I mention that our Unconference will not be recorded to create a relaxed environment for judgment-free peer-to-peer learning, creativity, and collaboration?!

Would you like to lead a session or submit a discussion topic related to Camunda, BPMN, or process automation? Let us know by April 4. 

On April 13, voting on the proposed discussion topics begins!

The official #CamundaSummit Unconference agenda will be announced on April 20. 

April 28 – Expert Sessions

Learn with us on the third and final day of Camunda Community Summit. The just-announced agenda features four tracks of expert-led sessions, packed with technical deep dives into Camunda Platform 8 and our other software. You are always invited and encouraged to join the sessions you’re most interested in, regardless of track. And, if you’re unable to choose between two that are going on at the same time, feel free to hop in and out or rest easy knowing that recordings of this day’s events will be available shortly after Camunda Community Summit 2022 ends.  

• Track 1: Using & Extending Camunda – Learn how organizations use Camunda daily to accelerate their work and be more effective.
• Track 2: Cutting Edge Camunda – See how organizations integrate Camunda in unique and interesting ways – from IoT to Serverless and more. 
• Track 3: Modeling for Execution – Discover how to take process modeling to the next level.
• Track 4: Our Path to Camunda – Follow along the adoption journeys and technical deep-dives from companies around the world that use Camunda products. 

See You at Summit!

Registration for Camunda Community Summit 2022 is now open! Look out for updates here on the Camunda blog or follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter using #CamundaSummit.

The post Camunda Community Summit 2022: Dedicated to Developers appeared first on Camunda.

The Camunda Community Summit offers participants the opportunity to learn, contribute, socialize, and grow. Specifically, you can expect:

• An interactive opportunity to learn from experienced Camunda community members
• A place to share your Camunda knowledge and experience
• A chance to meet and build relationships with others in the Camunda community
• A way to expand your knowledge and skills by getting real-world feedback on the work you do

Registration is now open, and there is no cost to attend. Want more details? Here’s the scoop: 

• Day 1 focuses on the topics that matter most to you during our Unconference. Our just-announced Day 1 agenda features sessions submitted by community members and upvoted by the community. From orchestrating microservices using the Camunda platform to proven strategies for creating a good process model, Day 1’s conversations with Camunda engineers and community experts will give you a unique opportunity to learn from and collaborate with each other.
  
  
• Day 2 kicks off with a keynote presentation by Camunda CTO Daniel Meyer; he’ll share a perspective of Camunda’s developer-friendly approach to process automation, an overview of what’s new in Camunda Platform 7.15 and what’s around the corner in our next release, and a look at Process Automation as a Service with Camunda Cloud. We then will break into three distinct tracks focusing on up and coming technologies, intermediate/advanced Camunda topics, and inside insights from Camunda employees. 

We are delighted to have some of the best and brightest minds in the industry sharing their expertise throughout the Camunda Community Summit. Our impressive speaker roster includes:

• Adrianna Tan, director of product management for the City and County of San Francisco, talking about how to use automation to simplify and improve existing needs and address future problems.

• Markus Stahl, automation engineer for Deutsche Post Adress, presenting his company’s open source contribution that provides a bridge between Camunda and Robot Framework, helping attendees understand why this combination outpaces common commercial RPA. 

• Krishna Kumar, principal software engineer of Walmart Labs, explaining how Camunda Platform helped the company grow its wireless business by combining customer-centric and process-centric approaches. 

The Camunda Community Summit promises to be a valuable, insightful experience for developers and process automation pros — and there is no cost to participate. Register today for the summit, and we’ll look forward to virtually seeing you next week.

Photo by Pakata Goh on Unsplash

The post A Can’t-Miss Opportunity for Camunda Developers appeared first on Camunda.

Camunda has always been focused on creating an excellent experience for developers everywhere who are trying to automate processes. From our days as a small process automation consulting firm to the powerful products used by hundreds around the globe, our engineering mindset and commitment to our community has always been at the heart of what we do.

Which is why we’re excited to share the final speaker line-up for our first ever Camunda Community Summit, taking place April 27-28, 2021. 

Highlights will include presentations from:

• Adrianna Tan, San Francisco Digital Services, will explore Automation in Local Government Digital Services in a Post-Pandemic World. 
• Markus Stahl, Deutsche Post Adress GmbH presenting: Open Source RPA with Camunda + Robot Framework.
• Plus Krishna Kumar of Walmart Labs, presenting: Process Driven Customer Interaction.

The Camunda Community Summit is a unique, interactive two-day event exclusively for developers, enterprise architects, and process automation experts. Featuring deep-dive technical topics, live coding demonstrations, and the latest advances in process automation, the inaugural summit will be held in an immersive, virtual and collaborative format.

Building on the success of the October 2020 Camunda Unconference, the first day will feature an Unconference agenda, where each session is proposed and up-voted by the Camunda Community to create an environment for peer-to-peer learning, creativity and collaboration.

The second day will feature expert-led sessions highlighted by interactive demonstrations of solutions built with Camunda, enabling attendees to learn from experienced community members and valuable discussions.

And we have even more exciting news — we’re introducing Camunda Community Awards to thank the people working to advance the Camunda community as a whole. These include project maintainers, individual contributors, and project collaborators, all of whom lend their extraordinary talents to help improve the Camunda open source ecosystem. 

If you know of an individual whom you feel is deserving of being nominated for a Camunda Community award, we would love to hear from you!

Whether you’re a Camunda newbie or a long-serving community member, you’re welcome to join the Community Summit and level up your Camunda knowledge, share experiences and ask questions. For a taste of what to expect, take a look at the results of our Community Unconference in October — where sessions were proposed and up-voted by the community. 

Registration for the Camunda Community Summit is open and attendance is free — register now.  We can’t wait to see you there!

The post Countdown to the Camunda Community Summit appeared first on Camunda.

In a previous blogpost, I mentioned that supporting your company’s empowerment of the technical community is the cornerstone of what we do as Developer Relations professionals. This foundational understanding can then be divided into a few categories: awareness, enablement, and engagement.

Let’s start with definitions. What do I mean by “empowerment”?

To give someone confidence or strength to do something.

The Path to Empowerment

In order for a technical individual to succeed with your product, they need to be confident that they have the ability to use your product, or at least the confidence that they can find the resources which will make them successful.

In order for them to have this confidence, they first need to be aware that your product exists and is capable of meeting their needs.

Next, the resources that exist need to be capable of enabling them to use your product. This could be your documentation, best practices guides, tutorials, client libraries… the list goes on. But this experience of onboarding with your product, and understanding that they’re capable of easily using your product to solve their problems, is a huge step toward adoption.

Lastly, once a community member has adopted your product, it’s time for them to engage with your community.

At Camunda, the DevRel team’s mission is to “provide opportunities for developers to be more successful by making them aware of our solutions, enabling them through great experiences, and fostering a culture of collaboration.”

We empower developers and other technical professionals to be successful by making them aware of our products and projects, enabling them through the content and excellent experiences we produce, and inviting them to engage and collaborate with us as well as other Camunda community members.

3 Functions of Developer Relations

Our team has three distinct functions: Developer Advocacy, Developer Experience, and Community Management. These three segments loosely map to the path to success that we set up for our community members: Awareness, Enablement, and Engagement.

Broadly speaking, our Developer Advocates are responsible for making sure our community is aware of the solutions we provide. They do this through producing content (blogposts, speaking engagements, livestreams, etc.), building sample applications and integrations, and building relationships in the broader tech industry. They also make our Product Managers, Engineering Leads, and other stakeholders throughout the company aware of relevant, actionable feedback from our community of users as well as the broader technical community. This product feedback coupled with information about the broader tech industry (what are the trends that they’re noticing? how are other open source communities handling certain issues? what’s the latest framework or extension that we should look into?) is incredibly valuable information and plays an important role in the enablement of our community members.

Our Developer Experience team is the team primarily responsible for this developer enablement. From the standardization, accessibility, and readability of our documentation to the initial experience a developer has when they first encounter our product to the contributor experience, this function is what puts the finishing touches on a fantastic talk from a Developer Advocate at a technical conference. The Developer Advocate makes people aware of the fact that our products exist. The Developer Experience team gives people the confidence to know that they can easily solve their problems by using our fantastic guides and resources. It also reassures them that if they do happen to find an area that they’d like to contribute to, we’re not only prepared for them but are willing and able to support and engage with them. This is where the bridge to engagement starts. As we focus on the experience of an engaged community member, we start asking questions about how we can engage with them further, keep them engaged, and move them further down the path to becoming a Camunda Champion.

Community Management is where the engagement function really starts to take shape. Our Community team works with our most engaged community members – those who run meetups, speak at events on our behalf, and continually give back to the broader community of potential Camunda users. From our Camunda Champions to our conference attendees and forum contributors, our goal is to build a strong community of people as well as connections — connecting members of the community with different functions at Camunda, as well as feeding useful tools and information back into the community.

Don’t Forget About Your Internal Community

As you can see, Developer Relations isn’t only externally-facing. There are places where the concepts of awareness, enablement, and engagement apply internally as well. How much time should you spend focused on internal engagement versus external? That’s a topic for another blogpost, but in the meantime, I’ll leave you with a list of ways my team fulfills this “Awareness, Enablement, Engagement” trio, both internally at Camunda and externally with our communities.

Internally to our coworkers: 

• Awareness of our team’s existence
• Awareness of the feedback that the community is willing to provide
• Awareness of the processes we can facilitate (feedback loops, documentation standards, etc.)
• Awareness of the way that the community members can serve the company (DevRel Qualified Leads)
• Enabling our coworkers to better serve the community (Enterprise customers as well as Open Source contributors)
• Enabling our coworkers to better communicate with our customers as we provide additional data about who those people are (e.g. patterns, general demographics, etc.)
• Enabling our coworkers to write, speak, and code in a public fashion in front of our audience.
• Engaging our coworkers with the community through DQLs, conferences, forums, social media, and more.

Externally to our community:

• Awareness of the existence of our various products and projects
• Awareness of our team & our mission
• Awareness of the resources we provide
• Awareness of our willingness to hear and transmit feedback internally
• Awareness of the solutions we offer (open source as well as enterprise)
• Enabling them to get up and running quickly and easily
• Enabling them to be successful in their company / role
• Enabling them to progress in their career through training opportunities, resume building skills, and more
• Enabling them to try new things (guest blogposts, guests on the podcast, etc.) as well as for them to experience a larger reach due to our amplification of their work
• Engaging them with each other as well as with our employees (cruise director analogy)
  • Forum/Slack
  • Social Media
  • Conferences
  • Meetups
• Engaging them in small, specific groups for knowledge sharing & community building (e.g. meetup organizers)
• Engaging folks to not only use our software, but contribute, collaborate, and give back (moving them up the pyramid of engagement)

A note for those of you who find yourselves pursuing all of these functions as a one- or two-person team, I recognize that we’re in an incredibly lucky position at Camunda to have a relatively large team and an executive team that understands the value we bring. If you’re responsible for awareness, enablement, and engagement and struggling to find the balance between them, I can empathize! I’d encourage you to read First, Understand the Company Goals to help you prioritize your goals and find a way to make the value of your work clear to your stakeholders. 

Secondly, find allies throughout your company. You’ll likely find others interested in Awareness in the marketing department. Look for your Enablement friends in the product and engineering divisions. Lastly, make friends with the support and customer success teams to help out with engagement gaps. By being smart about how you prioritize your tasks and working across teams to accomplish goals, you’ll find yourself making progress in all three areas.

Interested in more information about how to reach across all three of these functions as a small team? Let me know in the comments below and I’ll work toward a blogpost about the topic in the future.

This blog was originally posted on marythengvall.com

The post The DevRel Path to Success: Awareness, Enablement, Engagement appeared first on Camunda.

Whether you’re a current Camunda Platform user, interested in our open source software, or simply poking around our blog as a result of a tweet you saw from someone in our community, you may have noticed an increase in the number of times you’re seeing words like Camunda Cloud, SaaS, or Zeebe pop up over the past few months.

As you may know, we first released Zeebe, the source-available, community-supported workflow engine, in 2017 (read the history of Zeebe in our CEO’s words). Since then, in addition to creating an amazing enterprise product with Camunda Platform, we’ve been listening to your feedback on Zeebe as well as Camunda Cloud, working hard to build a SaaS product that you’ll love to use.

We’ve focused on stability, reliability, and performance with the latest release of Zeebe which came out on Jan 12. We’re far enough along in our innovation and cloud-solution development that it’s time for the next step, wrapping Zeebe technology into a fully supported, highly scalable SaaS offering to meet the needs of cloud-native workflows. More news to come in the weeks ahead as we ready Camunda Cloud for general availability launch.

Today we released Camunda Cloud 1.0.0-alpha2 — we encourage you to try it out and as always, provide feedback for us so we can solidify the product even more. With Zeebe as the engine that’s powering Camunda Cloud, we’re actively working toward better tooling with a variety of components including Console, Operate, and Tasklist (with Cawemo and Optimize coming soon!), more transparency into your processes, and an increased level of support, all of which will allow you to solve even more automation challenges at your company.

Zeebe Welcomes the Camunda Cloud Community

As we prepare for Camunda Cloud GA, we know we need a place for everyone who’s engaging with us regarding Camunda Cloud to ask questions, meet each other, exchange ideas, and share their latest projects. Rather than starting up a brand-new community, we’ve expanded and renamed the Zeebe forum and Slack group to include the entire Camunda Cloud community. Don’t worry — the forum and the Slack group are still the right places to ask questions about Zeebe and share your latest projects. But now you have a place to bring your questions about Camunda Cloud and all of its components as well. 

Additionally, we’ve moved all of our current repositories out of the Zeebe org and into the Camunda Cloud organization. The Camunda Cloud GitHub org now contains code that you can get paid support for, or use for free with community support. If you have any of these repos bookmarked, those links will still work — GitHub handles all of the redirects for us without a hitch!

We’re also excited to highlight community-maintained repos in a way that makes your contributions more accessible to a wider audience via our newly announced Camunda Community Hub, which will feature community-maintained repos for Camunda Cloud as well as Camunda Platform and BPMN.io. You’ll also find a handful of tutorials and tools built by our Developer Relations team — ways that we’ve used Camunda products to make our jobs easier. We’d love to hear your feedback as we continue to roll out GitHub labels and badges, as well as new and improved contributor documentation.

Moving Toward Camunda Cloud 1.0

You are welcome to continue using your current Zeebe ecosystem, but we hope you will transition to Camunda Cloud to take advantage of the additional features and functionality. Chief among these is access to our Engineering and Support teams, who will prioritize your issues and work with you to make sure that your deployment is successful. 

We’re working hard on Getting Started Guides, update guidance for 0.x to 1.0, and more over the next few weeks and would love your continued feedback as we start to roll these out. Whether you’re planning to use Camunda Cloud or continuing to use the community-supported Zeebe ecosystem, we’d encourage you to plan for the software update to 1.0 sooner rather than later, using our alpha releases to spin up some test clusters, work out any kinks, and figure out what you’ll need to update in order to be successful with the upcoming release.

What all of this boils down to is that Camunda Cloud, along with the associated features, components, and rebranded community forums, is just one way we’re prepared to better support the Zeebe community. As we continue to make improvements to the product as well as the community platforms, know that we have your best interests at heart and want to ensure the best possible experience for you.

Your ongoing support, feedback, and contributions are a big part of what’s gotten us this far, and we look forward to what we can do together in the future!

FAQ

What is Camunda Cloud?

Camunda Cloud is our newest product, which delivers on-demand Process Automation as a Service. It provides a powerful execution engine for BPMN workflows paired with tools for collaborative modeling, operations and analytics.

What Camunda Cloud offerings are available?

Camunda Cloud is available as a free trial, a professional tier and an enterprise tier. 

Depending on your subscription tier, Camunda Cloud is available in two different distributions:

• SaaS: all subscription tiers (the free trial, professional tier and enterprise tier) are available as a SaaS solution.
• Self-Managed: Camunda Cloud enterprise tier customers also have the option to deploy Camunda Cloud in their own data center or private cloud (“Camunda Cloud Self-Managed”).

What’s included in Camunda Cloud?

Camunda Cloud includes the following components:

What does this mean for Zeebe as a community project?

Zeebe is the process engine that powers our Camunda Cloud product offerings. 

Our commitment to developing in the open with a source available license remains unchanged. Zeebe 1.0 continues to be developed in the open under the same license (the Zeebe Community License), and can be used as a standalone component, along with its community ecosystem, without paid support. 

We do not plan to change this.

Zeebe continues to be developed and released on GitHub, but it is moved to a new GitHub organization: Camunda Cloud. We are also folding the Zeebe documentation into a new Camunda Cloud documentation website.

Zeebe ecosystem components that are primarily maintained by Camunda engineers, but which do not have a paid support offering or an SLA are moved to a new GitHub organization: Camunda Community Hub. 

Zeebe 0.26 will continue to receive maintenance updates until July 2021.

Is there a free trial of Camunda Cloud?

Yes, there is a free trial of Camunda Cloud. This allows you to try out Camunda Cloud and run development workloads in a SaaS environment on demand right away.

Can I run Zeebe on-prem or in my own cloud, for free?

You can run source-available Zeebe for free (subject to its license conditions – essentially, you can’t create and sell a Zeebe SaaS).

Can I get Enterprise Support for Zeebe?

Paid support for Zeebe is available via either Camunda Cloud Professional or Camunda Cloud Enterprise. Customers can choose either plan based on their process automation requirements. Camunda Cloud Enterprise customers also have the option of on-premises or private cloud deployment. 

What components can I run on-premises or in my private cloud for free?

You can use Zeebe and any community extensions.

You can run Operate and Tasklist without a production license during development. To use Operate and Tasklist in production, you need to subscribe to Camunda Cloud Enterprise.

How and where will new versions of Zeebe be made available to the community?

You can continue to download the latest version of Zeebe from GitHub and Docker Hub by following the instructions in our documentation.

How can I contribute to Zeebe?

Zeebe continues to be developed in the open. You can open pull requests and issues, and build community extensions just as you have before Camunda Cloud.

The post The Zeebe Community Welcomes Camunda Cloud! appeared first on Camunda.

Out of this commitment to our community comes our first Camunda Community Summit — coming live to your laptop on April 27-28, 2021. This inaugural summit builds upon our first Community Unconference last October. The feedback we received was tremendous and people have been asking for another event like it ever since.

This virtual conference, created by developers for developers, offers peer-to-peer engagement and learning through insightful technical topics. We’ll be focusing on engineering deep dives and demonstrations, so expect plenty of live coding in addition to lively discussions with fellow users and the team that builds Camunda.

Whether you’re a Camunda newbie or a long-serving community member, you’re welcome to join the Community Summit and level up your Camunda knowledge, share experiences and ask questions. For a taste of what to expect, take a look at the results of our Community Unconference in October — where sessions were proposed and up-voted by the community. 

Do you have a great Camunda Story?

If you’ve been using Camunda for a while, we’d love to hear from you. Our call for papers is open and we’re seeking insightful presentations from folks who’ve done interesting things with Camunda — whether at work or play — and contributors with stories to share, from maintaining plugins to writing client libraries.

The closing date for submissions is March 15, 2021 and you can apply here: Call for presentations.

We strive to make our events a reflection of the diversity in our global community, featuring speakers from different backgrounds, genders, and geographic locations, in addition to a variety of organizations.

If you have any questions or would like any assistance with your CFP, contact community@camunda.com.

Registrations for the Community Summit will open soon and we’ll keep you well informed with updates here on the blog and via our social media channels. Join the community in this exciting new event for two days of peer-to-peer learning, creativity and collaboration. We can’t wait to see you there.

The post Welcome to the Camunda Community Summit 2021 appeared first on Camunda.

Mission-driven organizations are often short-staffed, insufficiently funded, and underestimated. Our new program, Camunda for Common Good, offers an opportunity to give back to organizations that are making a tangible difference in the lives of people around the world. There’s a need for process automation and making operations more efficient no matter what industry you’re in and no matter who you’re serving, but the potential for NGOs and non-profit organizations, in particular, to vastly increase their impact on the world through automation, is compelling.

With the launch of Camunda for Common Good, we’re bringing our powerful process automation platform, combined with our expert knowledge, to support qualified NGOs and non-profit organizations that are making the world a better place. Camunda is uniquely able to help these organizations be even more effective with their work, helping them accelerate their operations and reach even more people. 

Camunda’s Desire to Make the World a Better Place

Since founding Camunda in 2008, Jakob Freund and Bernd Ruecker have worked to make a positive impact on others with our products. This goal is clear not only in the technical decisions we make but also in the very name of the company — Camunda comes from the Latin verbs “capere” (“to comprehend”) and “munda” (“clean”). This means we want to deeply understand the world around us and, based on that understanding, act in a way that is both effective and ethically correct in order to make the world a better place.

Over the past year, I’ve been working on a project that we internally dubbed “Good Causes.” The driving force behind this project is found in one of our company ambitions: Traction & Impact. A key point within that ambition is to “support causes that actually make a difference” and, in doing so, “make the world a better place.”

This is a very broad aspiration with a lot of potential opportunities, but Jakob and I decided on a concrete implementation: find organizations that would benefit from Camunda’s products, but are not financially able to purchase our enterprise licenses. The goal was simple: help these organizations get up and running quickly with Camunda so that they can serve even more people and touch even more lives.

After a year of hard work investigating other companies with similar initiatives and launching a small pilot of this program with our COVID-19 Response Program, I’m excited to announce Camunda for Common Good — a program created to empower NGOs and non-profit organizations around the world to reach even more people with the power of Camunda’s process automation platform.

Why NGOs and Non-profits? 

Many NGOs and non-profits are tight on time, money, and resources. As we observed their struggle to balance serving their current patrons while also scaling their operations for the future, we saw an opportunity to help. Camunda for Common Good removes some of the barriers these organizations might have, giving them the support and resources to get up and running quickly so that they can remain focused on their missions.

It’s not only about helping them automate the processes that are already in place. Of course, our primary goal is to help these organizations scale beyond what they’re doing so they can serve more people. But if we take this a step further, when these organizations are able to serve more people with the help of the Camunda Platform, their work is now more visible to a larger audience. This additional attention helps them get the funding they need to add to their staff or purchase necessary equipment and resources with which they can make an even bigger difference in their communities.

How are we Helping?

Organizations that are accepted to Camunda for Common Good will receive an enterprise Camunda Platform license. We care about making sure that teams get up and running quickly and successfully, so they’ll be paired with one of our excellent Customer Success Managers to receive top-notch onboarding and ongoing support, in addition to training materials to make sure that they’re implementing good practices. All of these resources, as well as access to our fantastic community of passionate Camunda users, are available at no cost to help them be even more effective with their day-to-day work.

At the end of the day, Camunda for Common Good allows these organizations to spend time on the work that matters. For Heimstatt e.V. Bonn, a German child and youth welfare organization, this means minimizing repetitive administration and more time focusing on the kids.

“Heimstatt e.V. Bonn runs two youth centers and two housing projects for young people in addition to a variety of other programs. With the help of Camunda’s process automation platform, we’ll be able to minimize the manual administration processes that our social workers have to spend time on, allowing them to focus on the kids rather than the paperwork.”

Heidi Fuerst, head of administration at Heimstatt e.V. Bonn

Help us help you! If you represent an organization or initiative that could use our assistance to make an even bigger difference in the lives of those around you, please reach out to us via this link.

The post Announcing Camunda for Common Good appeared first on Camunda.