In 2015, we created the FED@IBM program to support front-end developers and give them the opportunity to learn new skills and teach other devs about their specific areas of expertise. While company programs often die out due to lack of funding, executive backing, interest, or leadership, our community is thriving in spite of losing the funding, executive support, and resources we had at the program’s inception.

What’s the secret behind the success of this grassroots employee support program? As I have been transitioning leadership of the FED@IBM Program and Community, I have been reflecting on our program’s success and how to define how we have been able to sustain the program. In this blog post, I share the three key factors that contribute to the ongoing success of the program:

• Identifying engaging issues and building knowledge sharing platforms
• Empowering leaders through a distributed community
• Defining the group’s role in the organization

Identify engaging issues and build knowledge sharing platforms

When the FED@IBM Program started, the program’s creator Damon Deaner’s first task was to look at the existing grass root efforts already supporting front-end developers. In 2014, front-end developers in the flagship IBM Design Studio in Austin met regularly to share what they learned at a conference, introduce tools they were using, or discuss best practices for front-end development. The developers in this informal program were looking for a sense of community and support for front-end developers who were often the “lone ranger” on a project, outnumbered by designers or misunderstood by design leads.

Because IBM has offices all over the world, scaling out this effort beyond Austin posed some challenges. We believed that the full-stack or back-end developers across IBM who worked on the UI layer of their application could benefit from the program as well. While we could identify the front-end developers who were hired for our design program, we needed a way to identify and reach out to the full-stack and back-end developers who would benefit.

Damon asked Jessica Tremblay, who originally organized the Austin-based meetup, to work with him on a way to scale out the effort. Their solution was to launch a regular, virtual global meetup dubbed “FEDucation.” Rolled out in early 2015, the program encouraged community members to act as speakers and share about common front-end development topics, including using APIs, code reviews, DevOps, new concepts in JavaScript and using SVGs. Guest speakers like Alex Russell, Evan You, and Sarah Drasner have also joined to speak about their areas of front-end expertise.

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