Growing an Open Source Community

Open source projects are always understaffed. In this talk, methods to increase public visibility of your project as well as gain, keep and grow newcomers to maintainers will be presented. All methods are shown on the practical example and how they have - or not have - to be proven to be useful for the coala community. They focus on lowering the entry barrier as much as possible as well as rewarding successes and building a continuous learning process with the community.

If we can get people to enjoy working on static code analysis - what will you be able to do?

Transcript

1. Growing an Open Source Community
3. >200 Overall contributors
4. Getting Users
6. Reddit, Hackernews
7. Getting Contributors
8. GSoC Hackathon
9. 0 The black number is certainly higher. Just want to make you feel guilty.
10. Conversion Rate
11. Issue Levels “If I hadn’t had a newcomer task, I would have worked on the Linux Kernel.”
12. Documentation “You just need it.”
13. Respond now “Quick responses for me was the thing.”
14. Allow Non Code Discussions “I really enjoy how we support each other and the fact that we don't only discuss on programming”
15. Review Code “One of my favorite things (...), is the review process - I've learned so much (...).”
16. Let Code be Reviewed “By giving reviews I've learnt to pickup issues in my code before the commit in the first place.”
17. Promote Reward “You get a sense of appreciation.”
18. Automate
19. Ask for Feedback! “What made coala friendly was the eagerness to talk and help, and most of all asking for opinions from newcomers.”
20. Live the Spirit
21. Maintainers: Do it! Tell others!
22. Newcomers: Ask It!
23. Thanks! Lasse Schuirmann, http://viperdev.io/ “I'm sold on virtualenvs by the way; they're the best thing since double stuff oreos”