Davey Shafik, a developer advocate at Akamai, has shared some of his own thoughts and perspective on his site about building a community presence for your company and help it "do community".

Your company has decided it needs to “do community”, whatever that means, you’re community manager 1 number one, what now? From my time as a developer advocate/evangelist under both marketing and engineering teams, I have come to some conclusions about how to build community presence. Though my experience is mostly with technical communities, this should apply pretty well to any community building.

He breaks it up into three man sections, filling each in with some background and concrete suggestions you can use to help get the ball rolling:

• Identify Your Products Potential Audience(s)
• Breadth First Evangelism
• Depth First Evangelism
• Localized Evangelism

He ends the post by reminding you that, while these suggestions can help you "get your foot in the door". He'll be following this post up with another providing more about how you can use the feedback you get to enhance and improve your efforts.

Thijs Feryn has posted his latest in his series of video interviews with members of the PHP community. In this latest episode he talks with Gary Hockin of JetBrains about developer evangelism, the PHPStorm IDE and community conferences.

A couple of weeks ago I was in Las Vegas for Zendcon where I had to opportunity to chat with a lot of friends from the PHP community. This week’s episode features Gary Hockin, developer evangelist at JetBrains. Gary advocates the PHPStorm project and is a proud Welshman.

Because Gary and I are both evangelists, one of the central themes of the interview is developer evangelism. We talk about the life, the travel, the public speaking, but also about the not so glamorous parts of the job. Throughout the conversation we also talk about PHPStorm and PHP community conferences.

You can watch the video either through his in-page video player or over on YouTube. If you prefer the audio-only route, you can also listen on SoundCloud. You can also check out previous interviews Thijs has done in this category on his site.

Daniel Ribeiro has (re)published an article he originally wrote for the Web & PHP Magazine about becoming a PHP evangelist and helping to lead change in the community.

To evangelize is to effectively transfer information regarding one set of beliefs to another, with the final goal of converting each individual to the original belief. Isn’t that what we do when we spread the word of PHP?! The idea behind being a PHP Evangelist is for an individual to speak passionately about PHP and be able to have strong and durable arguments for PHP, if questioned about his “faith” in the technology.

He talks some about the skills and things you'd need to become an evangelist - an advanced knowledge of the language, thinking "out of the box" about problems and how you can stand out from the other people in the community as a leader. He also recommends being technically adept as well and contributing to projects, either through support or actual development.

PHP evangelists are born to lead, to form opinions, influence the opinions of others and to have followers – and haters as well. Even if you think you were not born to be a leader or just don’t want to be one, you will have to get used to public speaking if you wish to become a PHP evangelist.

In the latest episode of their "Cloud Out Loud" podcast series, Elizabeth NAramore of Engine Yard interviews Keith Casey about his role as an evangelist at Twilio.

They talk some about working at Twilio and Keith's role there, some about the Austin (Texas) technology scene that he participates in and a bit about the currently-happening TwilioCon that's running in San Francisco. There's also a mention of a conference that Elizabeth is involved in that's happening in November in Indianapolis, CodeConnexx (put on by the PHP Women group).

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player or by downloading the mp3. If you'd like this and more great episodes, think about subscribing to their feed.

Patrick Reilly has posted about a new group that's being formed in the PHP world - a PHP Evangelism Team designed to help promote the language.

The goal of the PHP Evangelism Team is to bring together the right people, resources and experience from across the PHP Community to provide developers with the process guidance and best practices needed to create new opportunities for the web.

They're also looking to help support local user groups and aid in any PHP-related event they can. You can subscribe to their mailing list to get more information as the group develops. Check out the post for the address to join the list.

Patrick Reilly has posted about a new group that's being formed in the PHP world - a PHP Evangelism Team designed to help promote the language.

The goal of the PHP Evangelism Team is to bring together the right people, resources and experience from across the PHP Community to provide developers with the process guidance and best practices needed to create new opportunities for the web.

They're also looking to help support local user groups and aid in any PHP-related event they can. You can subscribe to their mailing list to get more information as the group develops. Check out the post for the address to join the list.