Hi Henne,
a community of maintainers requires also the correct leadership. The last sureveys had (not published) content by multiple community contributors with "reasons" for this situation.
Gesendet: Freitag, 01. April 2022 um 16:50 Uhr Von: "Henne Vogelsang" hvogel@opensuse.org An: project@lists.opensuse.org Cc: factory@lists.opensuse.org Betreff: How to build a FOSS maintainer community (Was: Planning decomission of software.opensuse.org)
Hey,
redirected to project@ as this the more appropriate list for me to rant about community building :-)
On 30.03.22 13:23, Simon Lees wrote:
On 3/30/22 20:59, Henne Vogelsang wrote:
On 30.03.22 10:24, Simon Lees wrote:
which is why I spent alot of time looking at foundation related topics.
And that is nice and all. But *additionally* to doing the grunt work of attracting contributors, not *instead* of it.
Sure, do you have a magical time tree for me?
Sure not. And if you can't you can't. Your time, your decision. But you are not the only person in this crowd :-)
If I could think of simple easy things to attract new contributors I would absolutely have been doing them as well, but its hard and I don't have many ideas, do you?
This is a well established, written about, even researched topic.
There are tons of things we can do "passively" for our projects. And by projects I don't mean openSUSE as a whole. I mean all the building blocks that make up openSUSE. The teams, the software projects, the distribution etc.
- clarify *what* we want to achieve. What are the priorities? *Who* is the priority?
- establish contribution guidelines
- clearly express roles and responsibilities
- clearly express how we do conflict management
- document the path to leadership
- clearly express areas/problems that need attention
- establish onboarding practices for new contributors
- establish mentoring practices for contributors
- establish decommission practices (something isn't salvageable, get rid of it!)
- establish successor practices (people leave all the time)
So help existing openSUSE maintainers/projects by setting up a golden path to follow for maintainership. Basically define what is openSUSEs shared understanding of how FOSS projects are supposed to be if they are part of openSUSE.
Once the "passive" things are under control you can go out and be active about attracting people to projects.
- Practice running projects to our standards
- Practice mentoring & onboarding
- Ask *people* you think will be a fit personally (best thing to do)
- Hook into the existing mentoring programs
- Events
- Shouting to the public via blogs, social media, podcasts etc.
This isn't something we are alone with. *Every* healthy FOSS community does this. There are whole communities about building communities! Books, events, guides etc.
https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/foundations https://chaoss.community https://github.com/maintainers https://sustainoss.org https://opensource.guide/best-practices https://foss-backstage.de https://communityrule.info Working in Public by Nadia Eghbal The Art of Community by Jono
So there is, as usual, just a shitload of things to learn and to do.
I want to recommend an additional book for our openSUSE Board. "In The Open Organization Leaders Manual, a community of open-minded writers, consultants, speakers, and educators explains how those same open principles can help leaders refine their approaches to setting goals, building organizational cultures, and motivating teams." https://opensource.com/open-organization/resources/leaders-manual
The Open Organization Leaders Manual is something what is necessary now. We are living all open principles in the FOSS community and with that at openSUSE.
And also as usual: A crowd (like this one here) will not collaborate. Some people out of the crowd will be interested. And only a very small amount of those interested will actually be able to do it. And *those* are the openSUSE community.
We need to be more efficient in turning our crowd into a community of maintainers.
Henne
Best regards, Sarah
-- Henne Vogelsang http://www.opensuse.org Everybody has a plan, until they get hit.
- Mike Tyson