Building a successful Community program is a wonderful experience at the core of Community Management. What happens, however, when programs inevitably decline? This talk is about the equally important steps of eliminating outdated initiatives, deconstructing your favorite successes, and rebuilding from their foundations. Kara Sowles will take us through some concrete examples from her 5 years at a single company, including: * a user group program growing from 5 groups to 70 worldwide (and what it looks like to scale back after all that growth), * abandoning a series of 30/year one-day conferences, * remaking an online triage event into an online hack day, and more. We'll discuss the importance of having larger frameworks that you can plug programs into (and out) of, and the experience of destroying your favorite programs to stay nimble.

Kara Sowles is the Manager of Community and Evangelism at the software company Puppet, where she's spent the past 5 years leading strategic planning and implementation of the company's global community programs.