openSUSE:Community references
As the Community statement states, we'd like to have a friendly, welcoming, vibrant, and active community - and grow it. openSUSE is a unique community project. Communities seems to be one of the web 2.0 buzz words and therefore a lot gets written about how to
create and keep a lively and healthy community. Some of that is relevant for openSUSE as well. This page collects - mainly links - to information about community projects and their best practices. The goal is a reference for those that like to look beyond our own openSUSE community to learn from others.
Please feel free to add additional references or comment on the existing
ones on what you find useful in them.
General texts
- "Producing Open Source Software - How to Run a Successful Free Software Project" (download link) by Karl Fogel is not about any specific operating system or distribution. It is about making a successful opensource project and that makes it worth reading to any openSUSE member.
- "The OpenSource Way - Creating and nurturing communities of contributors" (download link) is written by Red Hat's Community Architecture team which is engaged in the Fedora project and contains what they learned on "creating and nurturing communities of contributors".
- "Book: The Art of Community" (download link) by Jono Bacon. Jono Bacon has written a well-structured book on all aspects of community out of his experience as Ubuntu community manager. He even mentions openSUSE in a few places.
- "Managing Firm-Sponsored Open Source Communities: A case study of Novell and the openSUSE project" (download link) by Jan Fredrik. An interesting account of how two development cultures co-exist and thrive, taking Novell and the openSUSE Project as example.
- "All you wanted to know about Open Development community building but didn't know who to ask" (download link) by Stefano Mazzocchi is a loose collection of various valuable techniques in dealing with nitty-gritty details of collaboration in a development community.
- "Book: The spider and the starfish" by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom. The books speaks about how organizations around shared goals evolve, flourish and are governed with many examples.
- "How to create an open source community"
- "Community Building 101" by Brent McConnell.
- "40 Great Resources for Developing a Community Management Strategy"
- "Essential Reading for Building Online Community"
- "The Four Conversations that Build Community"
- "Five questions about building community with Chris Blizzard of Mozilla"
- "Barriers to community growth" by Dave Neary. Discussion also at LWN.
- "The Role of Participation Architecture in Growing Sponsored Open Source Communities" by Siobhan O'Mahony and Joel West.
- "Six Secrets of Open Source Community Building" by Dries Buytaert, Drupal.
- "Avoid the tool trap when building communities" by Chris Grams.
- "Proposal for Best Practices for working in a MeeGo team"
- "Open Source community building: a guide to getting it right" by David Neary.
- "Go Local, Be Global: Scaling the Mozilla Localization Community" by Seth Bindernagel.
- "How To Build An Online Community - The Ultimate List of Resources" by Richard Millington.
- "Community Management Wiki" - a wiki about community with good (anti-)patterns
- "Designers, Women, and Hostility in Open Source" by Gina Trapani.
- "Designers and women in Open Source" by Vitorio Miliano.
- "The 7 principles of successful opensource communities" by Thomas Thym.
- "Get new contributors and diversity through outreach" by Asheesh Laroia
- "Open Source Community, Simplified" by Max Kanat-Alexander
- "Build your own contributors, one at a time" by Mark Smith and Denise Paolucci
- "How to be a successful contributor" by the Fedora project
- "How to contribute to free and open source software" by Bela Hausmann
- "14 Ways to Contribute to Open Source without Being a Programming Genius or a Rock Star" by Andy Lester
Positive and negative communication
- Flame Wars Reference Guide
- accentuate the positive
- KDE Community Working Group
- How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People, a one-hour video of a talk held by two former Subversion developers who work at Google.
- How to survive poisonous people
- When an influential community member goes rogue
- LCA: How to destroy your community by Josh Berkus.
- Four ways to undermine a community
- Why Should I Care What Color the Bikeshed Is?
Governance
Misc
Please help sorting these in proper categories.
- BETA: An Exploration of Fedora’s Online Open Source Development Community
- The Reader-to-Leader Framework: Motivating Technology-Mediated Social Participation
- Community by the Numbers, Part One: Group Thresholds
- 2008-11: Community by the Numbers, Part II: Personal Circles
- Community by the Numbers, Part III: Power Laws
Blogs about Community Building
- 10 steps to building a local community by Jos Poortvliet
- Community Guy
- Managing Communities
- Community Building Online
- Video about growing your community