5 ms·

Building a healthy community doesn't just happen by accident. Too many open source devs put almost no thought into the cultural aspects of building a community

by ef4 11y ago

Building a healthy community doesn't just happen by accident. Too many open source devs put almost no thought into the cultural aspects of building a community that is (1) not full of jerks, and (2) able to attract meaningful support from the businesses that use the code. Those things can be done, if you try, especially if you start early in the life of the project.

Ocerge 11y ago
In general I agree, but my own experiences (mostly with FreeRADIUS) show that sometimes a very "direct" maintainer can scare away most of the nagging riff-raff that this article describes. An inclusive community is great, but it seems like some companies might see that as an opportunity to take advantage of the project.
gamesbrainiac 11y ago
Just to give you some perspective, requests is one of the most used packages in the python ecosystem and it has an amazing community. If you're having trouble finding funding for a project that is as good as requests, then there's most definitely something wrong.
vinceguidry 11y ago
Devs aren't supermen. A lot of people get into open source because that's the way they feel they can best do something good for the world, to put their software development talents at work. Asking them to now go and develop a new set of skills, political savvy, that aren't just not in the same ballpark as dev, but not even in the same sport, they're going to just throw up their hands and walk away from OSS. When firms have talented but politically-averse individual contributors, they give them managers so as to best direct those talents. OSS needs to stop expecting themselves to do everything and get some bosses to shoulder some of the burden.
- edgyswingset 11y ago
  What I think you're hinting at is that OSS shouldn't just be for the developers. People who are good at curating a community but don't write a line of code are super valuable. They should be seeking out OSS projects (and OSS project owners should be seeking them out).
  - gamesbrainiac 11y ago
    I have to disagree with that. If you don't write a line of code, how are you supposed to actually understand what's going on? OSS projects are not simple Hello World applications here.
    - edgyswingset 11y ago
      > how are you supposed to actually understand what's going on? By talking with developers of the project! All it takes is a few conversations to get an idea about the why/what/when/ about a project and understand enough of its internals to be able to articulate those same things to others. Numerous other things can be done by people who don't write the actual code: * Writing a great "Getting Started" guide * Writing great conceptual documentation * Acting as a community moderator and squashing vitriol * Acting as a contact for companies needing work done on the project * Keeping things like Github Issues fully tagged, organized, and traced back to from Pull Requests That's just off the top of my head. There are likely many more things that an OSS project would value which someone who isn't writing code can do.
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
    - devonkim 11y ago
      You can just hang out on an IRC channel for a project for weeks and get a lot of ideas about how things work. Also, if we pitch documentation bounties the same way we do bug bounties, we'd probably have a lot better documentation for software projects. And if your project moves so fast documentation falls behind often, perhaps your project needs to redefine its core features enough or at least mark what is experimental and shouldn't be relied upon too much for production code. None of this stuff really needs someone to be anything more than familiar with general coding concepts. Heck, just hire some random person out of a coding academy and they can document as a way to learn the internals of a project for a while - not a lot of harm can be done to a codebase by documenting it, right?
    - johncolanduoni 11y ago

by ef4 11y ago

Ocerge 11y ago

In general I agree, but my own experiences (mostly with FreeRADIUS) show that sometimes a very "direct" maintainer can scare away most of the nagging riff-raff that this article describes. An inclusive community is great, but it seems like some companies might see that as an opportunity to take advantage of the project.

gamesbrainiac 11y ago

Just to give you some perspective, requests is one of the most used packages in the python ecosystem and it has an amazing community. If you're having trouble finding funding for a project that is as good as requests, then there's most definitely something wrong.

vinceguidry 11y ago

Devs aren't supermen. A lot of people get into open source because that's the way they feel they can best do something good for the world, to put their software development talents at work. Asking them to now go and develop a new set of skills, political savvy, that aren't just not in the same ballpark as dev, but not even in the same sport, they're going to just throw up their hands and walk away from OSS. When firms have talented but politically-averse individual contributors, they give them managers so as to best direct those talents. OSS needs to stop expecting themselves to do everything and get some bosses to shoulder some of the burden.

edgyswingset 11y ago
What I think you're hinting at is that OSS shouldn't just be for the developers. People who are good at curating a community but don't write a line of code are super valuable. They should be seeking out OSS projects (and OSS project owners should be seeking them out).
- gamesbrainiac 11y ago
  I have to disagree with that. If you don't write a line of code, how are you supposed to actually understand what's going on? OSS projects are not simple Hello World applications here.
  - edgyswingset 11y ago
    > how are you supposed to actually understand what's going on? By talking with developers of the project! All it takes is a few conversations to get an idea about the why/what/when/ about a project and understand enough of its internals to be able to articulate those same things to others. Numerous other things can be done by people who don't write the actual code: * Writing a great "Getting Started" guide * Writing great conceptual documentation * Acting as a community moderator and squashing vitriol * Acting as a contact for companies needing work done on the project * Keeping things like Github Issues fully tagged, organized, and traced back to from Pull Requests That's just off the top of my head. There are likely many more things that an OSS project would value which someone who isn't writing code can do.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  - devonkim 11y ago
    You can just hang out on an IRC channel for a project for weeks and get a lot of ideas about how things work. Also, if we pitch documentation bounties the same way we do bug bounties, we'd probably have a lot better documentation for software projects. And if your project moves so fast documentation falls behind often, perhaps your project needs to redefine its core features enough or at least mark what is experimental and shouldn't be relied upon too much for production code. None of this stuff really needs someone to be anything more than familiar with general coding concepts. Heck, just hire some random person out of a coding academy and they can document as a way to learn the internals of a project for a while - not a lot of harm can be done to a codebase by documenting it, right?
  - johncolanduoni 11y ago