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
   

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2. What is Open-Source?
   

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3. What is Community?
   

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4. Where do I Start?
   

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5. Where do I Start?
   Interact with your users
   Provide a platform for users to interact with each other
   

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6. Where do I do it?
   

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7. Where do I do it?
   Forums / Blog / IRC / Twitter / Facebook
   Make it public
   Make it free
   Open-source as much as you can
   

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8. How do I do it?
   

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9. How do I do it?
   Be friendly
   Help people
   Help people to help each other
   Don’t worry about moderation (for now)
   

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10. How can I make it grow?
    

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11. How can I make it grow?
    Identify & empower active members
    Start a Slack group
    Start a local meetup group
    Encourage other meetup groups
    

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13. Hugh Lashbrooke
    hugh.blog
    @hlashbrooke
    automattic.com
    

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