Jan Sonck is a Quantum Community Manager that's why this interview was special for me. While he is working on uniting business and academia around Quantum technologies, I have experience of making activities dedicated to Quantum Machine Learning.
Jan got enormous experience in telecom and tech, marketing, strategy, and innovation leadership, within over 30 years. And now he is applying all that to build a community! I'm happy about that as I can share his story within my Communit Managers’ Stories project. :) So, this is a story from Belgium 🇧🇪!
Enjoy!
Alla: Tell a bit about your Community management experience: how did you become a Community Manager? Are you a switcher from another domain, or were communities the only thing you always wanted to do?
Jan: I have been active for 30+ years in technology. Started as an analyst & programmer, moved into sales and product management, later into different management positions at smaller tech distribution companies.
The last 25 years I have worked for the Belgian main telco and run b2b marketing, corporate & b2b innovation, technology strategy and now quantum. For 15 months I started a Belgian Quantum Community as a side project, now this takes about 80% of my time.
It was not my ultimate ambition to run a community, but I experience that this is the place where everything I ever did and learned comes together. For years I could delegate a lot, while now I have to discover and do lots of things on my own, which I like a lot.
Alla: Tell me more about your Community!
Jan: I'm working with Quantum Circle Community. It boosts quantum adoption in Belgium. It started as a side project with a few like-minded people and has grown into something much bigger. What drives me is seeing how strategy, purpose, and practical innovation can come together — especially when working with users and building real-world connections.
Alla: What was the latest awesome achievement of your community that you are proud of?
Jan: Last November, in the first year of existence, we already organized our very first Quantum Circle Summit with 5 international speakers, 5 Belgian renowned speakers, and 250 guests. It was a huge success, feedback was overwhelmingly positive and we ran the event almost break even due to a low entrance fee + sponsoring.
I was very very proud, because although helped by a small group of volunteers during the last weeks and on the day itself, I had to do a big chunk of work practically on my own.
Alla: That’s truly impressive! I mean to design and conduct the whole conference… I organized two big conferences in one year and I should say it is not easy. But the responsibilities truly differ from what I usually did as a Community Manager. What are your typical responsibilities as a Community Manager?
Jan: I run the community end to end. I report to a founders board of 3 sponsoring companies. I am pleased to work with a team of 10 volunteering helpers and overlook 100 member organizations and 300 contacts. Apart from organizing webinars, seminars and workshops (which is mostly done by the team) I try to be the glue between all activities.
Alla: 10 volunteers, that's quite a team! How do you attract and motivate volunteers to join and stay active in your community?
Jan: Over the last 15 months, I saw people standing up, showing responsibility and exposing their talents in a natural way. Of course there’s people who join to mainly taste what could be in for them and leave after a couple of meetups. But in general, most of the core team drivers are committed for the long run.
Alla: How do you balance volunteer autonomy versus structured responsibilities?
Jan*:* Our approach is very iterative. For example: from the start the group decided to structure initiatives in workgroups, focused towards specific stakeholders like C-levels, tech experts or researchers. Today we are increasingly running projects requiring cross-disciplined resources involving multiple workgroups. No issue for me to change direction as we move on.
Alla: What was the biggest lesson you learned from working with volunteers so far?