community over code: how to build a successful project
TRANSCRIPT
Communities Over CodeHow to Build a Successful Project
Joe Brockmeier (@jzb)PRESENTED BY:
Manager, Community Team (OSAS)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
About Me (Briefly)
· Red Hat since August 2013
· Apache Member, CloudStack PMC, Incubator PMC
· Former openSUSE Community Manager
· Technology Journalist ~1999-2008, 2010-2012
· Likes books, Vim, cats, music, beer, and polar bears – not necessarily in that order.
What We'll Cover
· Why “Community Over Code”?
· Defining Success
· Governance and Community
· Infrastructure
· Marketing
· How Can We Help?
Don't Forget:@devconf_czHashtag:#devconfczMe: @jzb
What is “Community Over Code”?
Community Over Code
· How You Do Things is as Important as What You Do
· A Healthy Community Can Roll with Changes
· People Come and Go – No One is Irreplaceable or Permanent
· “But they're a great contributor” – doesn't matter
· “We'll do it right later” – maybe there won't be a later...
Core Principles
· Communication & Openness (“If it didn't happen on the mailing list...”)
· Mentorship
· Earned Rights (“Leave Your Hat at the Door”)
· Quality > Speed
· All Contributions Matter
· Users Matter
Defining Success
What Does Success Look Like?
· Define Project Goals
· What are you building, for whom, and why?
· Measurable
· Can you track your success? Can you trace it back to causes?
· Communicate the Goals Often, to Everybody
· It's easy to lose sight of the big picture.
· You can be successful accidentally, but don't count on it!
Governance &Community
Governance
· One Size Can't Fit All
· Have Clear Guidelines on How Things Are Done
· How does a user become a contributor?
· How does a contributor become a core contributor / earn rights?
· Golden Rule
· Diversity
· Skills and people
Governance Suggestions
· Everything happens on the mailing list*
· 72 hours for feedback
· Use “lazy consensus” to make decisions*
· Exceptions: Legal, missing stakeholder, security, etc.
· Leave your Hat at the door
· Company / titles shouldn't matter
· Make decisions stick
· Document, document, document
Infrastructure
Care & Feeding for Community
· Mailing Lists
· Forums ?
· Bug Tracker
· Documentation / Wiki
· Code Repositories
· Trello / Kanban, etc.?
· Continuous Integration (CI) & Testing Infra
· Translation tools
Face to Face
· Nothing beats in-person bonding.
· We still don't have beer over TCP/IP!
· You can't depend on in-person collaboration all the time – but try to make it happen sometimes!
· Find time for learning, doing, and socializing.
· Carry as much as possible back to the rest of the community.
Marketing & Promotion
Audience & Goals
· What are your goals?
· Fuzzy goals == unfocused
· Who are you trying to reach?
· Personas / profiles of users
· What do they want?
· Craft a story / message around how your project fits their needs. May need to “fix” the project!
· Feedback loop
· Talk to users, use their ideas!
Project Voice and Messaging
· Tailor Website to users
· Have talking points / messaging for the project that explains it to new folks
· Explain benefits, not features or low-level technology
· Show me how to be successful, quickly
Blogging and Social Media
· Take the time to write about what you're doing.
· Video / screencasts are also good – but remember the old-timers.
· Find contributors to help run social media, blogs, etc.
· Provide social media guidelines!
· Advanced: Editorial calendar, SEO, scheduled tweets, target influencers
Releases!
· Start planning release announcements early
· Ideally, before the first alpha
· Identify publications that might be interested
· Identify partner projects that might help promote your project
· Go big, but don't just focus on releases!
Summary
· Community is a process, not an end state
· You will never, ever, ever be “done”
· Successful communities change
· Single-company projects < Diverse projects
· If you build it, you still have to promote it
· If you're not growing, you're dying
· Golden Rule
