J Aaron Farr gave a talked at OSCON titled "So, You Want to Build an Open Source Community: Learning from Apache" about, obviously, building an open source community and a bit about Apache Incubator. First, community is the key to any open source project (this was restated in about every talk I attended at OSCON). It's not just about having a community of developers and users but about growing and evolving them so that all the developers are also users and many of the users become involved more directly. It reminded me of how Firefox has a lot more than just software developers, they have graphic artists, writers, lawyers, marketers, etc... contributing to the project. He emphasize that commiters (contributers) should eat their one dogfood. In other words, the developers and users should really believe in the project. Growth of the community is really needed to ensure the stability of the project. If you have a stable community then as people come and go others can continue it.
So what do you need to build the community? At a minimum working code that developers can contribute to and a good means for the community to communcate. Like a good web site with documentation, mailing lists, newsgroups, an issue tracking system, and a source code repository. Once you have all this you really need a clear pathway for people to see where they can contribute; like a web site that makes easy for people to see how they could contribute to the project and how to become a member.
He also discussed the Apache Incubator, which is a process the Apache Foundation setup to review projects for inclusion into the Foundation.
The slides for his talk are here and his blog is CubicleMuses.
11 August 2006
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