BuildingYourCommunity
From Community Leadership Summit Wiki
Building Your (Developer) Community
Organizer: Patty Dock
Attendees:
- Jack Repenning, CollabNet
- Neal McBurnett, Ubuntu, Election Audits
- Sara Ford, Microsoft
- Craig Cook, Ruby
- Brett McConnell, Novell
- Onno Kluyt
- Bryan Smith, Florida Linux Show
- Cedric Thomas OW2
- Gail Blondele, OW2
- Gary Green, UltimateOS
- Tiffany VonEmmal, Dreamfish
- David Strauss
- Nnenna
Bryan: Once you give someone something for free, they want to give back.
- I run a Unix/shell-login service, this draws developers who love to contribute
- Help with someone else's project, they'll help with yours
Gary: the hardest part of a young project is attracting developers. UltimateOS (home-user target) offers them a larger audience. We're trying to find developers interested in usability.
Cedric: If some community members pay and others are free, paying members can degenerate into "customers" (that is, people who complain without contributing).
Sarah: (Asked "how do people find CodePlex?")
- Went to a .Net user group, asked questions and listened to answers
- People liked visibility of requests, input, plans, progress
- Tell leaders to tell their people to contact me
- Treat all projects, users equally
Jack: Subversion team built a lot of developer contributers
- The topic itself happens to be very interesting to developers
- Brian made them do everything on the open lists
- Karl's inclusive, supportive, calming, match-making style
Onno: guide people in, lead them to a place to contribute (not just "anywhere you like").
Brett: created small-task list, each with a mentor. But this didn't work for him, never took off.
Jack: Subversion's "bite-size task list" has always been disappointing as well.
Gary: KDE "Junior Job List" did work, here's why
- Small, accessible lists marked as "junior jobs"
- People offer to help
- Ask what you like, what you want to work on, what interests you
- Offer short list (two or three) matches from the JJ list
- Say "talk to Joe, the leader of the area"
- Requires active engagement: have this dialog really quickly, or peole get overwhelmed
- Have someone responsible to make the JJs clear enough for a junior contributor to understand
Tiffany: things that have not worked for us:
- Started recruiting too early, when things were still very abstract, too visionary for a newbie.
- Stimulated a lot of developer interest before there was anything for them to do; later, when there was capacity, developers had already walked away, didn't come back.
Cedric: how do you generate user feedback?
- Bryan: people hate surveys; use IRC, rant-channels, real-time response; response to "bryan@somewhere," not "info@somewhere"
- Onno: if your achieve large scale (like Java, OpenOffice), can't afford human contact, provide voluntary registration forms, survey those
- Sara: record downloads, next time they connect ask how it went
- Sara: have easy path to feedback within the app
--jrep 22:00, 19 July 2009 (UTC)
