Building a Community Around Your Open-Source Product

Presented at WordCamp Cape Town 2019.

So you’ve released an open-source product – perhaps a WordPress plugin – and you’ve seen plenty of others with active communities built around them, but how do you achieve that for yourself? How do you build an organically growing community that loves your product? The secret lies in having a deep understanding of what open-source is and how that impacts your product, so let’s take a deep dive into the wide world of open-source and how you can leverage that to grow your product and build an active, vibrant community around it.

Transcript

1. Building a Community Around Your Open-Source Product
2. What is Open-Source?
3. What is Community?
4. Where do I Start?
5. Where do I Start? Interact with your users Provide a platform for users to interact with each other
6. Where do I do it?
7. Where do I do it? Forums / Blog / IRC / Twitter / Facebook Make it public Make it free Open-source as much as you can
8. How do I do it?
9. How do I do it? Be friendly Help people Help people to help each other Don’t worry about moderation (for now)
10. How can I make it grow?
11. How can I make it grow? Identify & empower active members Start a Slack group Start a local meetup group Encourage other meetup groups
13. Hugh Lashbrooke hugh.blog @hlashbrooke automattic.com