Over the years at InnerWorkings, we’ve teamed up with enough developer communities and local user groups to fill a small stadium. We’ve sponsored dozens of developer-centric events by offering free training, hosting contests, and giving away spot prizes.

Such user group activity is typically a positive experience with good intentions on both sides — organizers bring tangible value to the development community and vendors get meaningful product exposure to an influential group of developers and architects. Fair enough.

But these local efforts seem almost quaint in the shadow of some very large developer communities that boast incredible scale and reach. For me, it has been remarkable to watch the emergence of these massive, highly networked developer communities in the past few years.

Just for kicks, I’ve put together an informal list of these substantial developer communities — it’s admittedly a little .NET centric and apologies in advance for those I’ve omitted (but feel free to fill in the gaps in your comments):

• StackOverflow
• The Code Project
• DotNetKicks
• DZone
• Codeplex
• DotNetSlackers
• DeveloperFusion
• C# Corner
• INETA
• MSDN

Most of these communities have morphed from relatively humble beginnings into web powerhouses with millions of active contributors. StackOverflow is probably the most successful implementation of a beautifully simple community idea — creating a technology agnostic Q&A site for programmers that is collaborative and peer-reviewed. I think of it as Wikipedia for developers, and it’s great.

Another example of a developer community on steroids is The Code Project. It’s .NET centric but has racked up over 7 million members since inception, with tens of thousands of developers online at any given time. Everywhere you look, the scale of these successful communities is staggering.

So what is driving this rapid growth in online communities and programming forums? Certainly the increasing sophistication of community sites and the explosion of social networking behavior among users is a key factor.

But we also know that the demand for credible and useful technical information is almost insatiable among professional developers. In our experience at InnerWorkings, it’s clear that software development is one of the most knowledge intensive industries around today. Developers solve problems for a living and they believe in the power of community and collective knowledge to help them out when in a bind.

Whatever the driving factors, I wish all these mammoth communities the best of luck in serving their many millions of developers while crafting an unobtrusive advertising model to pay the bills. It’s a delicate balance for sure, but reaching competitive scale is a critical advantage when you’re building a community of any kind. For the architects of today’s software development communities, you have built it and they have come.

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