Community is a backbone of all sustainable open source projects and so at Docker, we’re particularly thrilled to announce that William Quiviger has joined the team as our new Head of Community.
William is a seasoned community manager based in Paris, having worked with open source communities for the past 15 years for a wide range of organizations including Mozilla Firefox, the United Nations and the Open Networking Foundation. His particular area of expertise is in nurturing, building and scaling communities, as well as developing mentorship and advocacy programs that help push leadership to the edges of a community.
To get to know William a bit more, we thought we’d ask him a few questions about his experience as a community manager and what he plans to focus on in his new role:
What motivated you most about joining Docker?
I started following Docker closely back in 2016 when I joined the Open Networking Foundation. There, I was properly introduced to cloud technologies and containerization and quickly realised how Docker was radically simplifying the lives of our developers and was the de-facto standard for anything deployed in the cloud. I was particularly impressed by the incredible passion and ever growing size of Docker’s community. Naturally, as a community manager, it’s a dream to have the opportunity to serve a community like Docker.
What are your main goals now that you’re part of the Docker team?
One of my main goals is to bring in my experience and learnings from my 15 years as a community manager in very different types of organizations and in different parts of the world. Through a lot of experimentation and trial and error, I’ve learned a ton. I want to take best practices and good ideas from other communities and apply them to the needs of Docker.
What will you focus on most in the next few months as you work to engage and help grow the Docker community?
That’s a tough question because there are so many areas I will be focusing on. Scaling a community is a big challenge and I want to make sure that the passion and excitement around Docker is translated into a growing, sustainable community that continues to bring value to our users and helps us achieve our business goals. A major challenge with growth is that processes and dynamics that worked well when the community was smaller can break down as the size of that community grows so the key is to empower leaders within the community to help scale efforts and push authority to the edges. That’s why the Docker Captains program will be a major focus for me. The Captains have been doing incredible work over the years and I want to help that program have even more impact in terms of engaging our existing community and the developer community at large. Another key area I will be focusing will be on developing community programs and initiatives that help us gather and surface user insights to our engineering and product teams. The more insights we gather about the way developers use Docker in their working lives, the better we can shape the direction of our products to fit their needs and use cases.
When you’re not building communities, what do you usually do in your spare time ?
When I’m not hunched over my laptop, I’m likely experimenting with a new recipe in my kitchen, reading history books or digging up rare recordings of my favorite Jazz artists. Lately though, I’ve become a chess addict so if you’re reading this and you’re into chess, ping me for a game!