---
title: "Helm Community Management"
authorname: "Matt Farina"
author: "@mattfarina"
authorlink: "https://mattfarina.com"
date: "2019-11-11"
---

[Devstats](https://helm.devstats.cncf.io/) and stats on GitHub are able to capture many different types of contributions to an open source project. But there is one type of contribution for which we have yet to figure out a good metric, and it has been essential for Helm's success. That is community management.

Karen Chu has handled community management for Helm since the project was first announced at the inaugural KubeCon in San Francisco. Her work ranges from big things, like planning and executing two Helm Summits, down to smaller (but still essential) things like managing the [Helm twitter account](https://twitter.com/HelmPack).

Until this point, Karen's role has been pseudo-official. There has been no Helm related title or sub-project of Helm for this work. We are happy to announce that we have now rectified the situation by formalizing community management as a sub-project of Helm with Karen as the person running the show.

Community managers do so much to make open source successful. Dave Neary, a community architect at Red Hat, highlighted some of the areas of value they bring in [a post about the roles filled by a community manager](https://community.redhat.com/blog/2018/01/the-many-faces-of-the-community-manager/). He talked about activities ranging from partnerships to developer enablement. We look forward to Karen's continued contributions in this space!

If you want to learn more about community management, Karen is part of a panel at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2019 entitled ["What’s Essential in an OSS Project Launch Playbook?"](https://sched.co/Uabt).
