History and Growth of the Atlassian Community

[Berry_OldStreet_]

Calling all Atlassian Community veterans! I'm writing a piece about how the Community has grown and changed since it began, how it went from Atlassian Answers to the fully-fledged discussion platform it is today, and I'd love to get your insights. 

What do you love about the Community? 

How do you think it has changed since you first joined? Have all those changes been for the better? Or have some brought challenges?

What opportunities has participating in the Community brought you? 

Have you made connections with people through the Community that you wouldn't have otherwise? How did those connections come about? 

I'm fairly new to the Community myself so I'm really interested in hearing people's stories about it, and their involvement with it. 

[Teodora _Old Street Solutions_Tempo_]

I can't leave a fellow co-worker struggling! 

A topic near and dear to my heart, and I will never get bored of sharing the story behind my Community experience.

Back in the 2016th days, when I was onboarding the Atlassian universe, I monitored their forum called Answers to educate myself about products, topics, relationships, and most popular issues or demands. 

With becoming more knowledgeable about my company's apps, I started to answer simple questions and provide basic solutions to users (not at the rank of @Nic Brough -Adaptavist-  or @Boris Georgiev _Appfire_ but not a full peasant level as well :D)

Answers evolved into Community shortly after. One day I received an invite from @Bridget Sauer to enroll in the Atlassian Authors program. Kid you not, I thought "That's a mistake, I can't even spell my name correctly in English, and they want me to be an author?!"

Well, I never miss a challenge, so I excepted and immediately started to learn and improve my writing skills (or the lack of writing skills...).

I dedicated this article to the fantastic opportunity the Atlassian Community presented to me. It's not just a random user forum but a place where you can thrive, find friends and establish long-lasting relationships. 

To answer your question, I haven't just made work-related connections but built the best friendships and enjoyed the best workplaces I could ever imagine. 

@Berry_OldStreet_ this turned too positive; please make sure to downgrade it to my usual mood. 😳

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I can give you a bit more history - Community (on Khoros/Aurora) is the fourth incarnation of it.

When I started looking at Atlassian stuff, I got a lot of help from mailing lists, chats, and then a Jive based forum.  Like @Teodora _Old Street Solutions_Tempo_ the help I got there lead me to want to give something back. 

I will not pretend there was some self-interest - if I started picking up the questions I could now answer, then it gave people like Neal Applebaum, Matt Doar, and Jamie Echlin more time to help me with my more difficult ones!

As Jive got outdated, Atlassian moved to a system based on OSQA , and then, as a bit of test-bed, Confluence with "Questions for Confluence" on it.  I seem to remember both were branded "Atlassian Answers".

This worked well, but still didn't really give us a Community feel, on-line and real-life leads were still not joined up, despite trying.  And the support team were stretched by it even more than OSQA.

So they started building the Community site on Khoros with a promise to dedicate more resources to it and join it up (better) with the real-life lead tools.  The move got accelerated when Answers buckled under a deluge of spam and malicious postings, which made it unusable.

I have exactly the same answer Teodora gave - I've made work-related connections, but new friends too.

[Berry_OldStreet_]

Thanks so much Nic!