I just listened to Mike McQuaid‘s FOSDEM talk, Why People Don’t Contribute to Your Open Source Project. Â If you are interested in communities and how they grow, I highly recommend you take a half hour and watch it. Some of the things I got from the talk: I get asked a lot what the difference […]
Why People Don’t Contribute to Your Open Source Project Read More »
Figure out what to measure. How will you know if your open source software project is wildly successful? What will be different with the world? What problem will it have solved? If you don’t know the answers to these questions, you won’t know what to measure. Often when projects start out, they measure what ever is
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Open source software communities, like companies and cities, can come in all sizes. They don’t get too big but they can grow faster than their infrastructure and processes. Take for comparison, the size of companies and cities. Companies come in sizes from one person LLCs to 100,000 employee megaliths. Cities come in sizes from a
Can your community get too big? Read More »
Community managers must make sure their projects are healthy. Before they can help foster and grow a community, they have to make sure it’s a well functioning, welcoming place. While community managers and project leaders often don’t explicitly talk about what’s not working well, you will often find them doing a wide variety of things. They are
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This week I am participating in the opensource.com community blogging challenge: Encouraging New Contributors! Crossfit gyms are great at creating community and welcoming new members. Here are 3 things that Crossfit boxes do that open source software communities could also do to encourage new contributors: Say hi to the new person. I drop in at
3 ways open source software communities could learn from Crossfit Read More »
While I don’t agree with everything Sebastian Junger writes in Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, I love the way he manages to articulate some things that I’ve noticed but never been able to describe. Just last weekend I was camping, and we had this torrential rain storm. People rushing to get their boats off the
“Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.†Read More »