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writethedocs-new-community
New Community
walkthrough.it - Trying to bootstrap a community
- going prety well with guerilla marketing, events
Has anyone bootsteapped the comminty? how did you do it?
Structuring the community
- would like a decentralized, distributed community,
- like Drupal - huge, lots of leadership, but decentralized
- maybe because there's a lot of "leadership vacuum" at the top
- lots of bi egos could grow & take over
- why do we want it that way?
- pros
- ambition:
- want it to be really huge
- want an open standard that the whole wrld will be using
- a good project to work in
- open source => more momentum
- not really an argument for decentralizing the community
- cons
- companies might be afraid if it's decentralized
- someone needs to define the standards
- purely volunteer-based community is bad for standardization
- missing power structure
- Wordpress community vs. Drupal community
- Drupal
- gift-based culture
- many small Drupal-based companies
- Wordpress
- I make a plugin, you pay me for the plugin
- freelancers
- is this because they do less complex work?
- is if possible when starting as a company?
What's the point? What do we want to do?
- Why do people want to contribute?
- Drupal, Mozilla - modular, people can take ownership of their work
- technical communities - almost always an aspect of ownership
- "prime directive"
- Drupal: other CMSs suck, we're building a better one
- Mozilla: lots of different motivations
- when they started, it was: people hated Misrosoft
- pretty powerful
- Q: What's your "prime directive"? Why would you care?
- "how to do it" follows from that
- People loving the product + open sourcing it
-> people are happy to contribute
- A crazy idea:
- you could get money to bootstrap the community, or
- make it a coop - customers/employees/suppliers "own" the service
- lots of investors that all pay a bit of money, but become owners
- advantage: financially involve the users
- another incentive to work on iy
- or a hurdle - getting involver in a coop (possibly internationally) it difficult
- you first need to get the users
- is this even relevant to our discussion?
- How did Elasticsearch get so big?
- 100% centralized
- 1 company employs all core contributors
- lots of
- started by 1 guy
- few people used it and loved it
- technical - it worked, solved a difficult problem
- support - author on IRC 24h a day
- the *spirit* in an open source project goes top to bottom
- owner(s) enthusiastic -> everyone who joins is enthusiastic
- same in Django
- many contributors just want to see their name in there
- have resources to help others join the project
- needs long term investment into helping others get on board
- elasticsearch: core developers who knew "everything" stalled development,
- concentrated on helping others
- after a time this sped up development substantially
- make the project internals amazing, so people want to work on it
- walkthrough.it: gearing toward both documentarians and developers
- how to gear it? top-to-bottom, or bottom-up?
- Elasticsearch: banks - bottom-up:
- don't sell to the bank
- get developers to run it
- decision time comes along - developers recomment what they know
- MySQL used the same strategy
- a warning example
- developers work for a company with a competing product
- another problem: a company works on it, why should I?
Ownership
- drupal & Mozilla have distributed ownership
- people are paid, but they keep ownership
- lots of incentive
- also what we want is lots of small contributions
- ownership doesn't come into play here
- libraries vs. products
- Firefox - most users can't fix bugs
- Django - every user has the skills to fix Django
- lower bar to contribute
- much more open, diverse community
- you can take as much or as little responsibility as you want
- tone & messaging - people need to understand where the bar to contribution is
- formalization of the steps: this is how you contribute, this is how you run tests
- make it easy for contributors to explore the project
- MDN: lead people from fixing easy tasks to becoming a module owner
- apprenticeship, mentors, handholding help a lot
- sprints at a conference - same effect, less resources
- contributors see that getting started is not hard
- offering opportunities
- different opportunities for different skillsets
- bug tracker - mark bugs as "easy fix"
- openhatch - aggregator for easy bugs across projects
- the second step is also important - how to retain contributors?
=== Session 2 ===
How do you maintain a healthy community
- So far we talked about contributors. Do we want to include users?
- MDN - had a big discussion on this
- there are contributors who don't participate in the community
- there are community members that don't "contribute"
- e.g. evangelists
- we value other things than just contributions
- conferences - organizers & attendees - what are they part of?
- organizing stuff as a way to get visibility in the community
- takes a lot of time to get as appreciated as the developers :(
- the "inner circle" didn't really notice newcomers
- Drupal: permissivenes
- you can just organize a meetup, don't have to ask for permission
- this started up a few communities
- this ties back to ownership
- support structure
- we'll supply speakers, know-how, money, but it's still *your* meetup
- Cathedral & Bazaar - both can be there
- some just want to contribute
- some have a plan, want to contribute to ahigher goal
- it's a scale, a project can have more of one or the other
- open question: How important is the "personal touch": to grow a community?
- evangelists, meetup, events
- it's about humans, interactions, individuals
- trust - you're more cautious with contributions from new people
- at events, you can build relationships
- this is why the conference hallway track is important
- Jannis: the personal touch is a requirement
- seting the tone is a part of this
- MDN: 3 distinct "hats"
- people who just do stuff, but don't talk to others
- people participating because of the people
- people that want to get involved in the community, looking for a niche for themselves
- Elasticsearch: when we go do a training, we also organize a meetup
- people see there are real people behind the project
- Drupal: Come for the software, stay for the community
- newcomers feel welcomed
- need people actively looking out for newcomers
- there can be bad blood in the community, especially with volunteers
Is churn inevitable? What'ds the life span of community involvement?
- MDN: university students
- people contribute for a couple of years, then get a job, and eventually leave
- seems to be universal
- people do translations to learn the project
- what to do with people with burnout syndrome?
- at that point it's too late
- "going through" release managers fast
- general questions:
- how to prevent people from burning out?
- how to keep people engaged & happy?
- how to gauge that?
- structure
- can have personal relationships with people in your group
- only care about the heavy hitters
- can track these, can talk to these
- no substitution for actual contact
- ES: a message from the creator is all that's needed for an unhappy person
- personal follow-ups are nice (a card from Mozilla)
- community managers?
- how to be a good community manager
- talk to people?
- understand how to solve problems for a community?
- connect people that work on the same problem
- connection building
- knowing what everyone does, to connect them
- find poeople with similar interests, throw a beer at them
- ES: most people need to engage the community
- evangelizing is part of the job description
- Mozilla is the same: all employees are representatives
- awareness of how people can contribute
- walkthrough.it
- can only send one person to conferences
- Mozilla: effort underway to make sure people are "socialized"
- hire people to do boring stuff
- community should do cool stuff
- doesn't scale - community contributor won't write a big feature
- ES: a technical guy with bad social skills
- is it better to close (not open-source) that portion of the project?
- most companies are not open-source
- even here, opennes is important for the open project
- otherwise you lose the welcoming aspect