Only in the last year did I start to truly understand the scale of the Atlassian community. I always knew the community website existed and have loved the openness and help received from it. But this last year I felt like I wanted to do more to give back. I felt like coming a community leader was the right step. Bring small intimate events to Atlassian enthusiasts like myself to the south outside of London.

Last week we managed to see this all the way through. We finally managed to launch the ACE Solent chapter last week. This week I just wanted to discuss a little on the community, why it is vital to product success and a little on this specific event. We had a great turnout for this event, especially since this was the first. Both customers, partners & a few from Atlassian themselves turned up.

Before we get a look at the recordings, lets just take a quick step back and look at the community as a whole.

What is the Atlassian community?

The Atlassian community was founded back in the mid to late 00’s by a few admins that simply wanted to find like minded individuals so topics could be openly discussed with other users that were experiencing similar challenges. Atlassian of course caught wind and like any tech company, provided drinks and pizza. Since then the community has continued to grow. This year it hit 4,000,000 active users, with thousands of events hosted by hundreds of chapters world wide.

The community is simply put a haven for knowledge sharing across like minded individuals on any topic for any of the Atlassian products. I know myself and many others head to the community on a daily basis for help & support, and where we can, provide that little bit back.

The community essentially allows the users of any Atlassian software to help publicise and share experiences, constantly improving everyone’s use of the tool. It gives Atlassian a never ending outlet of additional content creators, support engineers and product ideas from the millions of members. This is more then Atlassian could ever achieve without them.

Away from just the community website, many wont know that they also run ACE’s (Atlassian Chapter Events).

Why are ACE Events so important?

Outside of the community website, those chapters mentioned earlier also run events. Small intimate settings for anyone to come listen to great speakers, enjoy delicious food, drinks and of course enjoy the company of other Atlassian enthusiasts.

Not everyone gets to enjoy the luxury of attending the full conferences put on by Atlassian and its partners. The community is ran by volunteers that are here to make sure everyone, no matter their current or previous use has access to great knowledge through these events, helping to achieve the community missing of constantly boosting everyone’s shared thoughts and experiences.

So on to the Solent ACE’s first event. We had two great speaker sessions from experience individuals from within the speaker session. Let’s dive deeper.

Speakers

Nigel budd - Eficode UK

Nigel has been working as a solution architect at some of the largest Atlassian partners for the last 8 years, helping companies of all shapes and sizes navigate the challenges within Agile & Atlassian.

Chris Cooke - Tempo - Old Street Solutions

When I first met Chris, we were both working together at Clearvision. Since then Chris has continued his success & founded Old Street Solutions, the maker of Custom Charts for Jira, which has been acquired by Tempo as of April 2023. Chris is continue to share his knowledge with the rest of the ecosystem.

Nigel’s Session

Nigel spoke on how Jira Product Discovery, a more recent product, works and who the target audience is. Nigel’s knowledge allowed the audience to understand where within the software development infinity loop this is positioned. Take a look at his session below.

Chris’s Session

Chris spoke on the importance of great data, and why data has an impact on decisions we make. We have all had those moments where we think about making decisions with limited data or so much data the path is unclear. Well hopefully this session can help clear this up.