Speakers: Maciej Neumann, Lead Community Manager & Product Owner, Dynatrace
What is one important personal reflection or lesson from 2025 that you want to share with other community pros?
Maciej Neumann: I have an obvious reflection to share, but nonetheless, I think this is an important one, and it's worth repeating. There is an incredible value for most companies in the community and ecosystem around it, and one of the most important roles for the community professionals is able to show it, from helping with the support, onboarding, gathering feedback, building an image of the company who really listens to its users, to networking, customer advocacy, and gathering success stories. The list just goes on and on. If you are able to show the story to other stakeholders in the company in a way where they can see how they can advantage their own projects through community, then often the sky is the limit. Numbers help, get all the numbers, stats, data, and so on that you can prove your use case. But remember, good story, empathy towards other people in your company, and presenting the clear value of working with the community can get you a lot of buy-in. And through that, your community can really thrive.
What is your take on what is next for us as community professionals in 2026?
Maciej Neumann: What is the role for us? Guardians of authenticity and empathy on the internet. AI can help us a lot, automating common everyday tasks, better content and sentiment analysis of thousands and thousands of posts, doing better research, and just making stuff happen quicker. But we already see a backlash from the users about recent AI revolution, just to mention "slop" winning the award of this year. We can't automate human empathy. We can't automate emotions when we communicate both offline but also online, even in text. People did, do, and will always strive for authentic human connection, even if they are seeking just to solve their problems with a specific protocol tool. Communities are a great tool to provide that. And while there are some changes, there will be lots of changes. The main use case for us doesn't change. Let's connect people together to become something larger, stronger, wiser.
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