David DeWald will be the first to tell you he has never managed a coworking space.
He has never worried about whether the coffee was fresh or the copier had paper. What he has done, for the last 25 years, is build and sustain communities online — from the earliest days of the internet, through the rise of social platforms, to running one of the largest communities in its category today, and his role managing the user community of Ciena, a global leader in high-speed connectivity.
One can imagine a few useful parallels between online and in-person community management. What one got was a masterclass. David’s enthusiasm for this work is infectious, and his perspective reframes the coworking community manager role.
The skill sets are more alike than you think
David started our conversation with a point he clearly feels strongly about.
"There are a lot of things that community managers in coworking spaces can do to create what I call stickiness."
Stickiness. That word captures something important.
It is not about programming every waking hour of your members' time. It is about creating the conditions where people want to come back, want to talk to each other, and start to feel like something is happening here that they cannot find working alone at home.
The functional differences are real. David will never have to restock the supply closet or troubleshoot the Wi-Fi. But the core of the work, understanding people, creating the opportunity for connection, and making a diverse group feel like a whole, that part maps almost exactly.
Your space is full of beneficial collisions waiting to happen
One of David's favorite ideas is the accidental connection.
"You're a company using a coworking space to build a startup, and an online community manager has the hot desk two rows down. Maybe you're thinking it would be great to build a community around your startup. The fact is, if you're a four-person startup working in a coworking space, employee number five might be two desks down and you just don't know it."
The coworking community manager's job, in part, is to surface these possibilities. Not to force them. Just to make sure people know who else is in the room. A weekly standup where members share what they are working on is one simple way to do it. No agenda, no structure, just a standing invitation to show up and be curious.
David cited something that has been bouncing around the coworking world for years: "The person next to you is smarter than you about something. It's up to you to decide whether you want to find out what that is." The manager’s job is to make it easier for people to find out.
What community managers get wrong about failure
What are the hard lessons from 25 years of this work?
"You have to be comfortable saying that didn't work and letting go of it. A lot of people don't want to fail in the eyes of their boss. But you have to be okay with telling your boss it didn't work, because not everything is going to stick for everyone."
He is also emphatic about something that should relieve a lot of pressure: what works in one coworking community will not work in another. Regional differences, member mix, the personality of the space itself, it all factors in. So the failure is not usually yours. It is just context.
What he recommends instead is building your own knowledge network, a group of community managers from other spaces where you can swap notes honestly. He describes three types of communities, and the most useful one for operators might be what he calls a knowledge community.
"In a support community, I have a specific question and there's a right answer. In a knowledge community, I have a question and there are 16 right answers. My right answer might be a little bit of each one. It's the difference between asking how do you turn on a light versus asking how do you light a room."
A peer community of coworking community managers, sharing what worked and what flopped, is exactly this kind of space. If you are not already part of one, it might be worth building it.
We recommend The Creators Lab by Cat Johnson, honestly.
Find your champions and actually recognize them
Online community managers have a name for that one member who always introduces newcomers, rallies others to show up, and keeps the energy going. They call them champions.
"You've got that one person that's really out there, going and doing. They'd probably be a good community manager at a coworking space, even part time. Give them a discount for doing the extra stuff. Give them an unofficial title. Give them a special mug, some swag, something that says they are a little more than just your average co-worker there."
The old 90-9-1 rule from early internet days, where 90% consume, 9% interact, and 1% create, has shifted. David says the current reality is closer to 70-20, with 20 to 30 percent of members acting as real contributors and connectors. That is a meaningful number of people in your space who want to be more involved. They just need an invitation and a little acknowledgment.
He put it simply: "Build your reputation by helping others build theirs."
You are not just an admin assistant, and you never were
There is a persistent misconception in online community management, that the person doing the job is basically posting memes and keeping the lights on. The same thing happens in coworking spaces, where community managers get pulled into operational tasks and the deeper relational work goes unseen.
"Sometimes members or owners see these managers as very administrative and they won't see all the other stuff that person does. It's hard to teach people, hey, I do way more than this little thing you see."
His advice: a lot of it is experimentation, and a lot of it is invisible. The connections you foster, the energy you sustain, the culture you protect, none of that shows up in a task list. But it is the reason people renew their memberships. It is the reason the space feels alive.
Where to sharpen your (or you teams) skills
David is generous with resources. When asked what he would recommend to a coworking community manager who wants to go deeper, he pointed to a few places worth exploring. His framing was honest: these courses are built for online communities, but the overlap is strong enough that the adaptation is not a big lift.
David called her "wonderful as a person" and recommended her beginner's course as a strong starting point for anyone new to community management. She was an early contributor to CMX, a major community management training program, and her work is grounded and practical.
Bevy offers structured community management training and is well-regarded in the field. David noted that much of the CMX curriculum overlaps with what Carrie Melissa Jones teaches, so if you are starting out, either path gets you there.
The Community Roundtable and FeverBee
Both are geared toward enterprise-level community strategy. If you are managing a larger space or thinking about community at a portfolio or brand level, these go deep.
Ember is run by Bri Leever (based in Hawaii, with a strong community in Australia) and rounds out David's list of practitioners doing work worth paying attention to.
His closing note on all of them: frame the content as you go through it. Ask yourself how you would apply each idea in person rather than online. The translation is not hard. It mostly just requires a shift in perspective.
The work is the same. The room is just physical.
David loves this work. He manages communities at his day job, runs hobby communities on Reddit in his own time, and will, by his own admission, talk about community management with anyone who will listen.
"I love communities," he said, simply. "I just love them."
That kind of genuine investment is what makes a great community manager, online or off. You do not have to manufacture it. But if it is there, it is worth protecting and pointing in the right direction.
If you are a community manager in a coworking space wondering whether your work matters, David DeWald, with 25 years of evidence, would tell you it does. The room you are managing just happens to have chairs you can actually sit in.
