On Friday 02 October 2015 19:27:16 jdd wrote:
What drives me is curiosity. How many people leave openSUSE after having done the pretty difficult step of becoming a member? Why? is it simply life change or can we do something to keep them?
I think there is a lot we can do to keep them: * Provide a relevant purpose. With Leap we have the best chance since years to do that, to do a distribution which reaches many and new users, a distribution which matters, and not only to the existing core of active contributors. * Offer tasks which are self-contained enough to be done even when you are short of time. Maintaining a package of your favorite software is a good way to do that. We just have to make sure that this is as easy as possible. * Take part in the exciting upstream projects, which attract the people who are drawn to technically interesting projects. We have a good example with docker, where we provide excellent packaging and more (e.g. Portus). If we do this for more, we can keep the people who look for new things. * Have a clear direction. If everybody knows where we go and moves along with all others we create momentum which drags in people who might otherwise stay inactive. We had the discussion about writing down the vision of Leap. That would be one step. * Recognize active people. Do things like the "people of openSUSE" interviews, a commit digest highlighting interesting contributions and who did them, revive the openSUSE weekly news, etc. * Offer a place where people can feel as part of the project, even if they have no time to contribute anymore, and keep the barrier for reentering the active community at zero height. If people have the feeling that they never left and the right task walks by they might pick it up. * Some people simply outgrow the community. They might be kept by addressing them on a different level. One of the typical examples are programmers which become managers, start their own companies, or do a similar career step. They might not be contribute with technical work, but maybe they can help with creating partnerships, organizing events, finding money, or similar things. * Create opportunities to maintain friendships with people in the active community. This could be release parties, hackathons, inviting former contributors as speakers to events, social events at conferences, etc. * And more (insert your ideas here :-) These are just a couple of ideas off the top of my head. I'm sure you have more, and with a bit of refinement they could be turned into activities to address active people, those who want to become active, and those who didn't realize yet, that they want to be active in openSUSE, but still do ;-) -- Cornelius Schumacher <cschum@suse.de> -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org