Community or just a bunch of people?
Community or just a bunch of people?
When you're a t-shirt-wearing programmer or even a white-collar manager
(is
there anyone out there?), working on a live open source project, you
always care about the community. The community of developers or real
users, these thousands of smart
Joes,
Volkers or
Lenkas,
hopefully enjoying the project that you have also contributed to. And
you
wonder, is the community growing, is the product attractive enough to
catch the attention of new users, while satisfying the old kids on the
block? While you can measure all these attributes, there are also other
fundamental questions.
Community life
Just think about
the
word community. And then compare it with your thoughts
about your lovely project and its
dispersed crowd.
Do you see real community in the original sense of the word or is it
about a bunch of people downloading your software and registering on
some
kind of dumb 3-page long web form? How would you know that the xK-head
monster is alive and moreover, how do you drive behavior of your
never to-be-seen peers?
So here is my simplified definition of vivid and enchanting community
project and although I bet 5$ I missed a couple things there, it's my
Top
3+1 List:
- Incentive to contribute to the project
Think of all sorts of rewards, power to make decisions, 'I made it'
effect or other forms of satisfaction.
I'm sure everyone likes his nickname shining somewhere and it doesn't
have to be gold plaque in the Hall of Fame.
- Help wanted
How to help must be crystal clear. If you want to have
a group of people that shares something and you don't want to leave
someone out, you need to offer newbies and random visitors a paved
path and an open door to your party. Move
the needle!
- Who's the Einstein 2.0? Challenge everyone!
Developers love challenges and if the work is too dull, don't expect
smart folks showing up.
- It's not just about The Work, it's about The NetWork
Hey, people gathers in communities to meet other
this-looks-like-me animals and have fun with them. They should be
encouraged to help each other, not just to work on the big idea.
How the
NetBeans project scores
using my definition, I'll leave it open now, ready to be blamed and
flamed.
Posted at
07:00PM Nov 19, 2007
by Pavel Suk in Open Source |