Keeping the Forge Lit

The shifting role of technical communities in an age of instant answers

AI didn’t replace communities.
It has replaced the pain that drove people into them.

Fourteen years ago, I remember attending a Microsoft SQL Server user group where only two of us showed up, along with the speaker.

It would be easy to read that as failure.
But what stayed with me was not the turnout. It was the willingness to show up anyway. To present. To listen. To participate.

That moment taught me something about what these spaces actually run on.

If you have organised a meetup, maintained an open-source project, or tried to keep a community space alive, you will recognise this pattern.

Attendance patterns wobble.

Familiar faces come once and disappear. Speakers arrive, deliver thoughtful work, and move on, rarely staying to meet newcomers, answer questions, or become part of the fabric. Even among organisers, the pull of client work, deadlines, and life gradually reorders priorities.

No villains here, just gravity.

But it reveals something deeper about the environment we are operating in.

We have more access to knowledge than at any point in history.

Answers arrive instantly. Tutorials autoplay. AI systems generate explanations, examples, and even working code.

The friction that once pushed people into rooms, to ask, to struggle, to compare notes, has been dramatically reduced.

When learning becomes frictionless, the psychological reward loop shifts.
Effort no longer requires social exposure, so identity forms privately rather than communally.

What happens to communities when the need that built them disappears?

After years of organising and attending technical user groups and watching thousands of practitioners move through them, this work has been one of the most formative parts of my professional life.

Others have observed similar shifts in online technical knowledge communities, where the struggle to articulate problems is disappearing. In physical communities, I see the same pattern reflected in participation itself.

Technical communities have always ebbed and flowed. Attendance cycles are not new. What feels different now is not fluctuation, but structural dependency. People no longer need communities to unblock work. Participation has shifted from necessity to choice.

And with that reduction comes a subtle shift in identity.

It becomes easier to consume knowledge than to contribute.

Most of us recognise this pull.
Convenience is powerful.
Participation asks more of us.

One evening after an event, I received a message from venue staff about someone who had arrived late, stayed briefly, and then left. Nothing dramatic, just uncertainty about how to interpret the interaction. From their perspective, it was unusual. From mine, it was familiar.

Communities vs Information Transfer

Community spaces attract people at very different points in their lives. Sometimes they arrive confident and curious. Sometimes they arrive carrying hesitation, transition, or anxiety about stepping back into shared environments. Still others are navigating change in their careers.

That moment stayed with me because it highlighted something easy to forget in an era of frictionless digital learning.

Communities aren’t just information exchange points.

They’re places where people test belonging.
Where they gauge safety.
Where they negotiate identity.

Participation isn’t always clean or predictable. It can look tentative, ambiguous, or even uncomfortable. None of that happens in a prompt window or tutorial stream.

Communities of practice don’t run on information transfer.

They run on presence.

The Invisible Labour

On awkward first questions. On half-formed ideas. On conversations that wander into disagreement, politics, or collaboration.

Those messy human dynamics aren’t side effects.
They’re the mechanism through which craft actually moves between people.

By craft identity, I mean the internal shift in which competence becomes relational, shaped by dialogue, feedback, and recognition rather than the solitary accumulation of knowledge.

Keeping the forge lit also means confronting something less romantic. Invisible labour.

Events don’t just happen. Someone emails speakers. Someone negotiates venues. Someone coordinates logistics, nudges volunteers, answers late-night messages, and absorbs the emotional temperature of the room.

Community sustainability is not an emergent property.
It is a maintained infrastructure.

That work sits in the margins of already full professional lives, sustained less by incentives than by care and belief that these spaces matter.

And where there is labour, there is politics.

Communities are made of people. People bring ambition, stress, disagreement, personality, and changing priorities. Sometimes organisers align effortlessly; sometimes they don’t. Relationships shift. Expectations diverge. Conflict happens.

None of this is failure.
It’s what happens when something real is being built together.

Communities are inconvenient by design.

And that inconvenience is where growth lives.

Participation teaches negotiation, boundary-setting, collaboration, and repair. It teaches how to stay when disengagement would be easier. How to carry responsibility without control.

No model, tutorial, or prompt window teaches that.

If anything, these imperfect dynamics are why communities remain important. They resist sterilisation. They resist optimisation. They resist becoming frictionless products.

Much of this work is invisible, unpaid, and done after long professional days, yet it is the infrastructure that makes belonging possible.

In a world trending toward curated feeds and personalised outputs, communities still ask something older of us.

Patience.
Tolerance.
Presence.
Contribution.

From Practitioner to Consumer

If friction once produced practitioners, convenience now produces consumers.

This tension is most evident in the shift from practitioner to consumer. Not as judgment. As a structural outcome.

When knowledge is abundant and frictionless, consumption becomes effortless. You can absorb ideas endlessly without exposing your understanding to others.

Practitioners operate differently.

They ask questions in public rooms.
Present unfinished thinking.
Explain concepts they’re still learning.
Risk of being wrong in front of peers.

That vulnerability is formative.

It sharpens reasoning.
Deepens memory.
Anchors identity in doing rather than viewing.

Consumption does not demand that progression. You can stay comfortably informed indefinitely. It’s efficient, personalised, and often useful. But it does not produce the same transformation as participation.

Modern tools are extraordinary amplifiers. They lower barriers and accelerate exploration.

But amplification alone doesn’t build craft identity.

Craft forms where effort is witnessed.
Where feedback is immediate.
Where participation carries real consequences.

Where people recognise each other over time, not as usernames or prompts, but as presence.

One fills the mind.
The other shapes the practitioner.

The Invitation

If there is an invitation here, it isn’t nostalgic or heroic. It’s simple:

Show up.

• Ask a question in the room.

• Stay after a talk.

• Meet someone new.

• Share an unfinished idea.

• Offer help.

• Return next month.

Communities don’t need everyone to lead. They need continuity of presence. Small contributions of energy over time.

Participation is not measured by visibility.
It’s measured in investment.

Reframing communities for the AI era means accepting that they are no longer the primary gateway to knowledge. That role has shifted, and that is fine.

Their value is evolving toward something more human:

• Sense-making

• Mentorship

• Identity formation

• Accountability

• Belonging

AI can generate answers.
It cannot replicate shared experience.

When information is abundant, discernment matters.
When solutions are automated, judgment matters.
When learning is individualised, collective context matters.

Communities provide these counterbalances, not as competitors to technology, but as complements to it.

The forge shapes the craft.
The arena tests it.

The bigger risk is not community disappearance.
It’s forgetting the difference between being informed and being formed.

Keeping the forge lit isn’t about resisting change.
It’s about recognising what remains irreplaceable.

Maintaining spaces where effort is visible.
Participation is welcome.
Craft is transmitted through presence rather than download.

At its core, this reflection crystallises three observations:

• Knowledge access is no longer the primary value of technical communities

• Practitioner identity forms through participation, not consumption

• Human friction remains a necessary condition for craft transmission

I don’t know what technical communities will look like in ten years.

But I know they won’t survive on answers alone.

The arena doesn’t need to be crowded.

Answers scale.
Formation does not.

It simply needs people willing to step into it
to try,
to err,
to contribute,
so the next person who walks through the door finds something still burning.

I would be curious to hear what you are seeing in your own communities.

Are people showing up differently?
Or are the motivations for showing up changing?

Communities survive when someone decides they still matter.