Earlier this week, it was my distinct pleasure to invite the 5000th human to the Rands Leadership Slack. This endeavor has greatly exceeded my expectations while also continuing to teach me about community management and leadership.

Started on June 1st, 2016, the Slack is now 5000+ members with roughly 1700 of those humans being weekly active. We have 361 public channels. On daily basis, our users are posting 4000+ messages on work days. As measured by number of members, our five most popular non-required public channels are: #1-1s, #daily-challenge, #help-and-advice, #hiring-and-interviews, and #engage-and-retain.

Other observations:

• Most of the original rules of the Slack remain include my favorite: “channels are free.If a member wants to create a channel, go for it.
• We continue to make integrations and emoji community accessible and with few incidents, but we have created #rands-tech-support with a set of volunteers responsible for keeping an eye on these important cultural moving parts.
• It’s a leadership Slack dedicated to understanding the learned skills of leadership. This might be a reason incidents amongst the community are relatively rare over the past year and a half. Even so, I can not understate the value of our community-built Code of Conduct. Not only has this document served as as useful rubric for informing our actions, it’s presence helps define who we are as a community. We’re on our third iteration of this document and it improves with each iteration.

More importantly, I love hearing the stories about what this collective group of humans are accomplishing. Regional meet-ups are regularly happening, members are finding jobs, and members are attending conferences for the time in their lives because of the connections they make within this community.

The internet is full of… colorful humans. As the Leadership Slack continues to grow, I continue to be impressed by how the community treats itself. It’s all there in the FAQ:

“We expect that we’ll treat others with respect. We encourage debate; we ask for patience, and we remind you that you’re here to learn and that means being open to a diverse set of ideas.”