#11. Jan Sonck. The story about the quantum community and awesome volunteers. Belgium 🇧🇪
- Alla Zhdan / Алла Ждань
- May 25
- 7 min read
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?
Jan: Although community work is not a fixed job for our core team, many volunteers are very committed and driven towards the result. Timely delivery though can be a challenge. We can’t expect volunteers to complete tasks within time frames comparable to the ones applied in daily jobs.
Alla: Aside from your awesome team of volunteers with whom do you collaborate the most?
Jan: We recently decided to outsource part of marketing and communication supporting tasks to a specialized agence. Here I think about:
website development,
newsletter management,
socials and operations of our community’s collaboration platform.
Also, finance and accounting are assigned to specialists.
Alla: Do you collaborate with other Communities (companies) in your domain?
Jan: Yes. I developed relationships with some established business and technology focused user groups. By organizing events with and through their channels, our community gains credibility, practical support, reach and market acceptance.
Alla: How do you build collaboration? Are you supporting each other in sharing the events and activities you do within your communities (info partnership)? Or do you co-organize something together? Any other different ways to cooperate?
Jan: It depends. Because we are a young organisation we rely more on others than they need us, but we try to create win-win relationships for the long run and will never hesitate to show gratefulness openly.
Alla: What soft skills are important for a Community Manager, in your opinion? Please don’t limit yourself; list them all!
Jan:
Curiosity: look around, see how others do things, what can work over here
Empathy: be open for ideas, feedback of all kinds, individual perspectives
Culture: know that you work with many people all from different (business and academic) backgrounds
Flexibility: willingness to change course constantly as long as the destination is kept
Vision: know where you want to get in 3 to 5 years and what needs to be done short term
Perfection: not everything needs to be perfect, but at least it must be as good as possible
Respect: have respect for others, for opinions, for those who say no
Alla: What are the top 3 hard skills a Community Manager should possess?
Jan:
Stick: to the initial purpose, community’s vision and main long term goals.
Manage: the team, although they are working for free, manage them with 2-way respect
Deliver: on the promise, quality, timely, driven by KPIs just like in the business.
Alla: What tools do you use regularly, and how do they help you do your job faster or more efficiently?
Jan: Excel & Planner, I use like an old school planning tool. Word, to compile key documents, supported by CoPilot more and more. PowerPoint: I give a lot of presentations, but reuse my material as well. Microsoft Teams, for almost all meetings, I flex to Google, Zoom, … if someone asks for. LinkedIn, very much to communicate on activities, events, accomplishments and extend reach. CRM (HubSpot), as a member database, profile builder, newsletter tool. Circle, we started using this platform and app as a community collaboration tool.
Alla: What do you think about Circle.so so far, Jan? Did you have a chance to implement it in April?
Jan: We opened up the platform for about 25 test users and started to upload content within the different workgroups and workstream channels. In May we’ll invite 300 extra users. We are aware of the fact that it will take at least 3 months till we see activity uptake in terms of contributions, feedback, chats, etc; Also, we know that it will require a series of reminders to onboard everyone. Goal is to drive online meetups, webinars and tutorials within Circle only as from September.
I’m a “creative generalist” meaning that I’ve always been very curious, reading a lot, learning from books, newsletters, reports, etc.
Alla: What books do you recommend for Community Managers?
Jan: Did read some on community managers, but most are not complete because they focus on a US-Style Community Management which is an extension of a company like Salesforce, Adobe, Microsoft, … and many others. So far, most inspiration through books comes from general purpose topics like entrepreneurship, startups, etc .
One in particular I liked was about “effectuation”, it's about starting with almost nothing, based on what you can and who you know and building gradually at low cost.
Alla: What do you like the most in working with the community?
Jan: Fact that although the destination might be plus minus clear, the road goes up and down, and sometimes you can and should even get lost along the way! Also, the many interactions with mostly new contacts gives me a lot of positive energy.
But not everyone likes uncertainty, that I know; I am never afraid to ask for help, support, advice, money, etc. Mostly if you play it honest, with sympathy and enthusiasm, people say YES. What gives satisfaction is that results can come very fast, as long as you build gradually with small steps.
Alla: That was quite a nice talk about Quantum Communities and not only! ;) Thank you, Jan!
It's been a while since I posted a story in my blog as all of them were mostly podcast episodes. After a story with Eva I shared one in audio format with Liz and Sebastian, so today it's time for the article again and I'm happy about it. Both formats to picture experience of my fellow Community Managers is amazing and I'm looking forward to share with you more "voices" and "text". ;)
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Learn more about my Community Managers' Strories project to gather insights from Community people from 42 European countries here.
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