History of the Orbit Model

By Josh Dzielak — Co-Founder and CTO, Orbit — May, 2023

It was November 2014 during an offsite at Keen IO in San Francisco. My colleagues Justin Johnson, Tim Falls, and I grabbed a room to talk about out developer community strategy. I was completely new to community building but Justin and Tim already had lots of experience. I was eager to learn from them so I got up, asked questions, and started whiteboarding some of the ideas that cropped up. It was also right after lunch, so I knew that standing up to whiteboard would help me avoid a food coma.

After an hour it was time to wrap up and head to another session. As one does, I took a photo of the whiteboard before leaving and didn't think much of it afterwards.

Almost 9 years later, it's fun to look back and see how far this simple cocktail-napkin idea has come.

In 2016 I found myself working at another developer-focused API company, Algolia. This time I was in an actual community role as a developer advocate. I found myself struggling to create a coherent strategy for all levels of the community and to help the organization understand the role that each community member played. I remembered back to the conversation I'd had at Keen IO and decided I would try to use the "concentric circle thing" during an all-hands presentation I was giving at our upcoming offsite in Frejus. The circle thing needed a name, and Algolia's community branding was very space-oriented, so I decided to call it the Orbit Model.

During the presentation, I went through each "orbit level" of Algolia's community and talked about what members are there, what they do, what they need, how many there are, and how many there could be given different investments we could make.

I received good feedback on the presentation, much more consistent than the feedback I got about the 60-person improv exercise I also conducted 😅

Post-Algolia, I started doing consulting for community and developer relations. My first client was StackShare, led by CEO Yonas Beshwared. Yonas had a powerful vision for how StackShare could become more community-oriented by connecting developers around technical decision making. With the Orbit Model as a guide, I helped design the feature that became Stack Decisions and that successfully brought StackShare a whole new energy wave of community and product usage.

In 2018, my friend Patrick Woods and I started consulting together, merging the independent efforts we'd been running. After finding it was popular with our clients, we decided to write a blog post about the Orbit Model. Patrick had much more agency experience than I did and he knew we needed to put this idea out there so people could find it, and us. Patrick put pen to paper and brought many of the underlying Orbit Model ideas up to the surface, while finding new ideas and new connections that weren't there before.

In 2019 I gave a talk at DevRelCon London. It was the first time I spoke about the Orbit Model on stage and I was definitely nervous. But much less nervous than the 60-person improv exercise, and in the end it worked out. I had a lot of good conversations at the conference about the model and how other folks in developer relations had faced similar situations.

Also in 2019, Patrick and I formed the company Orbit to create the tool we wanted our consulting clients to already have, one that would get them started on the path of measuring and increasing the love, reach, and gravity of their community. Thanks to our amazing team, we were able to build a product and get it in the hands of many communities and businesses to use. Along the way we received tons of great feedback and ideas from the community that we've used to improve and iterate on the Orbit Model.

Fast-forward to 2023 and we're still hard at work. A cocktail-napkin idea is only worth the effort you put into it. There's still much more we can do to make the model easier to use, more satisfying, and more powerful. Soon we'll be releasing a new site for the Orbit Model (the site you're on) and more tools to practice it. I'm confident it will begin a new chapter.

Personally, the mission of helping people build communities still burns strong. If it does for you too, keep following along with the Orbit Model. I also invite you to keep in touch and get involved in our Discord server, the #orbit-model channel. See you out there 🖖