Table of Contents

1. Presenting the Open Source Way

1. The Shape of Things (I.e., Assumptions We Are Making)

2. Structure of This Guide

3. A Community of Practice Always Rebuilding Itself

2. Getting Started

1. Community 101: Understanding, Joining, or Forming a New Community

2. New Project Checklist

3. Creating an Open Source Product Strategy

3. Attracting Users

1. Communication Norms in Open Source Software Projects

2. To Build Diverse Open Source Communities, Make Them Inclusive First

4. Guiding Participants

1. Why Do People Participate in Open Source Communities?

5. Growing Contributors

1. From Users to Contributors

2. What Is a Contribution?

3. Essentials of Building a Community

4. Onboarding

5. Creating a Culture of Mentorship

6. Project and Community Governance

7. Community Roles

8. Community Manager Self-Care

6. Measuring Success

1. Defining Healthy Communities

2. Understanding Community Metrics

3. Announcing Software Releases

7. Contributors

1. Chapters writers

2. Project teams

This guidebook is available in HTML single page and PDF.

Bugs (mistakes, comments, etc.) with this release may be filed as an issue in our repo on GitHub. You are also welcome to bring it as a discussion to our forum/mailing list.

Presenting the Open Source Way

An English idiom says, "There is a method to my madness."[1] Most of the time, the things we do make absolutely no sense to outside observers. Out of context, they look like sheer madness. But for those inside that messiness—inside that whirlwind of activity—there’s a certain regularity, a certain predictability, and a certain motive. A method.

A method is a way of doing something, a particular manner or style of practice. The practice of open source community management can seem like its own form of incomprehensible madness, especially to someone who is unfamiliar with how open source software gets made, or those who find themselves staring down the prospect of having to coordinate others to join in making it. What this guide hopes to provide is some insight into an ever-evolving methodology, a form of practice. At its core is a simple question: What are your preferences for practicing the open source way?

But beyond that, this work is really digging into the question of why someone might do the work this way. Why use this or that method to organize the madness?

So from this introduction you should take two important points:

1. There is a what, a how, and a why to the practice of successfully and sustainably creating and maintaining open source software.

2. This guide distills opinions from a sizeable group of open source practitioners, the kind of people always having to answer the question of, "Why do we do this open source thing the way we do it?"

In particular, this guide is a living document that endeavors to gather and spread a diverse group of voices who are similarly (and somewhat-opinionatedly) collecting the best ways to create and manage an open source software community.

These voices are all part of this community of practice around open source software community management.

The Shape of Things (I.e., Assumptions We Are Making)

When you look at this guide’s table of contents, notice the organizational flow: from user to participant to contributor. This arrangement specifically tracks our view of how a community comes about and grows. And it all starts with a need. If you’ve worked in open source projects and communities, you’ve likely seen the cycle many times. It goes something like this:

1. A person or group addressing a problem creates the first iteration of software that offers one solution to that problem.

2. Other people with similar needs start using it, forming the core of a userbase.

3. From the userbase arise enthusiasts, people who promote the software and the community emerging around it (that is, the values and principles that project seems to espouse).

4. Eventually arising from the users and the enthusiasts come people who are interested in (and have grown capable of) contributing to the software in some way; they ensure the project remains active and responds to the changing nature of the problem for which it was originally developed.

Thus, the primary and continual focus for a project is to take good care of your users, for some of them will become your contributors, and you want them to do it out of love more than resentment.

A key element of all this is recognizing the value in contributions of all types, at all levels. Rather than valorizing only a single type of contribution, the best practice is to treat all manner of gifts to the project as equal. These contributions comprise content and code, hours and effort, and all types of broad contributions for the project via events, discussion forums, infrastructure maintenance, and so on.

When you lower barriers to participation, you make your project welcoming at all levels. This doesn’t mean you remove all barriers—just lower most of them appropriately. Appropriate barriers are necessary for someone receiving keys to systems, for example, and these barriers are different from those allowing only certain participants to contribute a help article or a patch to the configuration management system.

Our core opinion

There is an opinion at the core of this work, that explains how the content is laid out, how the steps on the path are revealed so that you can find yourself wherever you are in your journey of open source practice.

Focus on your end users and lower the barriers to participation all around.

Contributors arise from participants, who all started as users.

Make your software wildly successful by having a user-centric initiative, while making the community open and welcoming those users curious enough to investigate how the software gets created.

The pathway of this guidebook therefore is:

1. Attract users to your software because it solves the problems they have; then

2. Guide participants who care about open source and sharing good solutions so they can be effective enthusiasts for your software; and

3. Grow contributors from this rich, fertile user and enthusiast base, by making sure when any of those folks look into how the software is made, they see themselves represented and can imagine how they could fit in, too. Make sure when they get to the contributor party, the barriers are clearly lowered and welcoming.

Think of it this way: It’s one thing to let people know about your great dance party. It’s another thing to empower those dancers to advocate for your way of throwing a dance party. It’s a very great thing to make the dance party able to evolve to welcome all manner of music and dance from the world around us.

To get the dancers who see your poster and show up is the first step to stick around, and it helps if they can see right away that this is a place for them and theirs, too.

You can see this pathway to project success doesn’t necessarily emphasize expertise (or even existing skills relevant to the project) more than curiosity and willingness to try the software, to care about the software, and to help create the software. This does not mean that people don’t bring skills to the project; they do, many of them right from first point of contact with the project. But it is easier to teach skills than to teach someone to truly care about your project.

In this journey, there are many best practices we recommend, including how to put together a plan for measuring your community’s progress. We also list some specific areas to be careful of and watch out for, including a robust discussion on self-care and mental health considerations for community managers themselves.

Our best way of more-deeply conveying all this information is with stories. Aside from stories that naturally arise in the body of the chapter, there are other areas in the guidebook and in The Open Source Way community to gather all these stories of why.

Structure of This Guide

Each section of this guide consists of one or more chapters.

A chapter represents discussion of a discrete topic or closely-related set of topics.

The idea is that you can open and read a chapter as a stand-alone experience without needing to read the rest of the guide to understand and act from the material in that chapter.

The vision for the 2.x series of this guidebook is for each chapter to consist of several aspects. The version number in brackets indicates when that aspect is planned to appear:

- An introduction. [2.0]

- Primary material, written in third-person point-of-view, focusing on a balance of what, how, and why content. The examples (stories) told here are brief and in the third person. [2.0]

- Each chapter contains a lexicon at the end that defines the special usage for terms within that chapter. [2.1]

- Expanded stories come at the end of the chapter, and are one or more stories from the chapter author(s). These may be written in the first person—that may be the most effective way to make the point in many cases. These stories are modular, in that another story that makes a similar point but from a different situation can be used instead. [2.2]

- The idea is to start with a base story or set of stories in a chapter, and supplement or substitute other stories that are contributed to the project, such as through the interview effort. [2.1, 2.2]

Finally, we’re collecting stories from practitioners of the open source way, stories we know tend to illustrate more than one principle in action. The idea is to start with a base story or set of stories in a chapter, and supplement or substitute other stories that are contributed to the project, such as through the interview effort. Stories not interspersed into chapters will be collected at the end of the guide (for your endless uses).

A Community of Practice Always Rebuilding Itself

What you are reading here is just one facet of the growing body of principles, implementations, and examples that this community is gathering, cultivating, and maintaining.

In the end, it’s just one way to pull this material together (one method, you might say, of organizing the madness). We’ll be updating this guide. We’ll be issuing similar, new guides. And we’ll experiment with other ways to understand and present this material.

But at the core—in addition to the what and the how that benefit your open source community—you will also learn to understand the why, and be able to spread those stories wherever you go.

[1] From "Hamlet" by William Shakespeare, Act 2 Scene 2: Polonius (aside) "Though this be madness, yet there is method in `t"

Getting Started

Wherever you are in your journey as an open source practitioner, it is always useful to understand and pay attention to the basics. These basics include some of the types of common knowledge that "everyone knows in the community", yet no one is sure how they learned it, and it’s not always written down. The chapters in this section are good places to start for practioners of all levels.

This section contains chapters that:

- Introduce some core concepts around open source communities.

- Outline steps you might take in starting an open source project.

- Define key terms and words you will encounter throughout this guidebook.

This section is useful for you if:

- You are unsure where to start.

- You want to read an overview of the steps of starting a new open source project.

- You want to see what steps to take for growing strong community.

- You are looking for the definition or more meaning about a term or word you encounter in this guidebook or in the open source world in general.

- You like to read things from the beginning.

Community 101: Understanding, Joining, or Forming a New Community

Introduction

This chapter is named Community 101 in reference to a way of numbering courses at colleges and universities. The "101 course" is the material you first encounter as a learner in a specific field.

There are generally two pursuit areas where it comes to getting involved in open source software from the very beginning. The first pursuit ranges from understanding through to participating in an existing open source community. The second pursuit is deciding to start a new open source software community yourselves.

This chapter is in two sub-sections. The first covers pursuit toward participation. The second covers how you decide if you want to start a new open source community.

Understanding the basics—what is an open source software community?

If you are considering forming or joining an open source community for the first time, some of the concepts may be new. This section explains the basics of an open source community, and why people and organizations get involved in them.

What is a community

A community is a group of people united by a common identity and collective purpose who engage in activities together over time. Communities develop unique sets of shared values, principles, and norms that distinguish them from others and provide members with a sense of belonging.

What is an open source software community

An open source software community is a group of people united by the shared purpose of developing, maintaining, extending, and promoting a specific body of open source software. These communities are often globally distributed—their members occupy different geographic regions and work across numerous industries. What unites them is their common vision for the open source software project—as well as the spirit of camaraderie and collective identity that participating in the community affords them.

What are upstream communities

The community-driven ecosystem of open source software is vast and difficult to visualize, so many developers tend to describe it metaphorically, preferring the language of waterways and tributaries. Software that forms the foundation of other software is said to exist "upstream" from that software. When "upstream" software undergoes changes, those changes flow "downstream" to the open source projects that rely on them. When programmers working "downstream" create innovations that might benefit others, they can submit those changes "upstream" to their parent projects, so those improvements can ripple outward to everyone utilizing those same upstream projects.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux, for example, exists "downstream" from many open source software projects that comprise it, such as Fedora and CentOS Stream. Those projects, in turn, rely on additional "upstream" projects—like the Linux kernel, the GNOME desktop environment, and hundreds more.

How an open source software community forms

Open source software communities form when people agree to work together to build and improve software. For this to occur, a person or group building software must make that software available to others—by releasing the software’s source code and expressly giving others permission to copy, modify, and redistribute it (typically under the terms of a specific open source license).

Because open source communities are globally distributed, they typically form online through the shared use of electronic mailing lists, forums like Discourse, and code-sharing platforms like GitHub.

How someone gets involved in an open source community

Most open source software communities don’t have formal membership applications or approval processes. More commonly, people get involved in projects simply by contributing to them in some way—for example, by fixing bugs in software code, creating new features for an application, writing and editing documentation, creating logos and graphics, promoting adoption of the software, representing the project at a conference and other events, or assisting others who have questions about the software.

In short, people earn membership in open source software communities by virtue of their contributions to those communities and the positive reputations they establish as a result of those contributions.

Why do people join open source software communities

People join open source software communities for many different reasons.

Many join because working on the software is part of their jobs—either because their organizations hired them to develop it, or because their jobs depend on the software working well. They join communities so they can directly impact the development of software on which they (or their organizations) rely for critical operations.

Other people join because communities offer opportunities for them to sharpen their skills by working alongside and learning from others.

Some join because doing so allows them to collaboratively solve a problem they’re experiencing.

Some join because of their belief in the importance of contributing to a common set of resources beneficial to everyone. And others join for the purpose of socializing, or for a sense of identity and affiliation.

Why organizations get involved in open source software communitities

Organizations increasingly rely on open source software applications for various critical operations, as much of the world’s most innovative and effective applications are open source. So they participate in open source software communities because they’re invested in the long-term viability, stability, and security of those applications—and, often, because they want to influence development of those applications' features and functionalities.

Other organizations participate in open source software communities because they’d like the software they’ve developed to become an industry-wide standard—they open their work in the hope that others will more quickly adopt and integrate it.

Many organizations find that participating in open source software communities allows them to access a wider talent pool than they could if they developed their applications entirely in house.

How an organization can start participating in an open source software community

Consider engaging an open source community using the same approach you might take when you move into a new neighborhood. Introduce yourself and work to understand the community’s history, values, and dynamics before proposing big changes.

Make new friends by performing small jobs. Fix bugs in source code. Edit documentation. Build installation scripts. If your organization is able to allocate additional resources to support the community, consider sponsoring that community’s activity at events or hiring community developers so they’re able to spend more time working on the project.

Just note that arriving in a community with more people than it can comfortably welcome at one time may elicit a reaction from the community, which can be counterproductive to an organization’s long-term goals. And choose your organization’s initial participants in a community wisely. Individuals—not organizations—join open source communities, and the trust one participant garners is not automatically transferrable to another person or organization.

How companies who are market competitors participate in the same open source communities

Many companies are in this position. These companies have determined that collaborating on mutually beneficial software applications or standards is more valuable than competing to develop different, perhaps incompatible, technologies. Instead, their business models involve building market-differentiating and revenue-generating innovations on top of these shared technological foundations.

How an organization determines whether to get involved in an open source software community

Getting involved in an open source software community has important organizational, procedural, and legal implications for an enterprise. Most organizations that are seriously invested in open source software development fund internal open source program offices (OSPO) to advise the organization on matters related to open source community participation. Others partner with open source experts to advise this work.

Considering forming a community

It is possible and not uncommon to have software that is open source and the maintainers have shown no interest in forming a community beyond themselves. Frankly, not every code base needs its own community. Conversely, any code base may suddenly find itself at the center of a community that arises around it. Being open source doesn’t mean it must have a community. But it does mean that if it has one, it gets certain benefits particular to open source software.

Forming an open source software community has many of the same ethical and organizational considerations of forming any other community of practice. A community of practice is a group of people who share a common interest, who also get together to learn and practice within the common domain.

An example of a community of practice might be hammer dulcimer players who have an annual gathering to share about the art and practice of being a hammer dulcimer player. Or it might be skateboarders, gathering every week at the park to learn and practice new tricks.

For you and your organization to consider forming an open source software community, you must first ask yourselves: are you willing to form and be the caretakers for any other sort of community? Does doing so match your vision? Does it match your style of getting things done?

For example, an organization like a university or a branch of the armed forces would have two very different approaches to getting things done. Their reasons for forming any kind of community may be wildly different, or unexpectedly aligned.

A feature of communities of practice that applies to open source software communities is how they can truly draw together people and organizations form wildly different worlds. The key is when their common interests cross (the practice) and when there is tolerance for sharing and growing together (community).

Some other considerations around forming an open source community:

- You are interested in the benefits of open collaboration and innovation. You might already have or are planning a new technology, and open source is a way to find like-minded collaborators. Or you may just have a feeling that this is the right approach for your plans.

- Attracting enthusiasts to your project is a key part of your growth strategy, and you’ve identified that open source contributors of all types are good enthusiasts for you.

- The scientific method is core to your mission, purpose, and/or practices, and you see the benefit of having your entire software toolchain, infrastructure, et al as something your users should be able to contribute to and become maintainers of.

- Your organization is one that is open, collaborative, and community-building by nature. You may create right-sized open source projects, where the users and contributors are closely aligned in some way. For example, collaborators at a university. If there is no legal barrier to starting a project, why not start one? You never know who might find it and benefit from it in the future.

Forming a community: Defining project goals

Anyone advising open source communities on project goals has likely found themselves asking project leaders the same basic questions. This chapter outlines seven of the most common questions communities can ask themselves as they work to articulate a project’s goal.

What is the project?

This should be a very basic question. But its answers typically aren’t. Too often, open source projects describe themselves in terminology unfamiliar to many potential users, or they focus on how they do what they do, rather than on the problems they can solve. When formulating potential answers to this question, focus them on how the project helps its users. What problem does it solve? How would you describe your project to a potential user of the project in the most succinct terms possible?

For example, let’s imagine we’re asking an Istio developer what Istio is. The most basic answer is "it’s a service mesh." One might argue, however, that most container application developers don’t entirely understand what a "service mesh" is. So the shorthand description—"It’s a service mesh!"—doesn’t help a novice understand if or how to use it. A better explanation might involve describing Istio in terms of an application data plane and control plane (if I am talking to someone from the networking world), or perhaps a concept of traffic cops assigned to components of an application (if I am explaining the project to someone unfamiliar with the concept of a service mesh).

Ask as many follow-up questions as your community needs in order to develop a simple, straightforward understanding of project and what it can do.

Who are the project’s users?

Many open source projects do not clearly understand who uses their projects and what those users do with the project’s tools. Consider using the concept of "personas" to characterize archetypal groups of key users, and be sure to think in terms of "jobs to be done."

You might categorize a project’s potential or current users with a number of criteria:

- Is the project more useful to an individual or to an organization?

- Is your project particularly useful in a specific industry vertical or business domain?

- What size organization will find your project most useful? Are you targeting sysadmins in large enterprises, or the small and medium business space?

- What are the job titles of the people who will be downloading, installing and using your project? Are they the same people? Or are the users different from the project administrators?

- What is the relationship between the people who download and install open source projects and the people who evaluate and purchase commercial products?

Answers to these questions will influence the priorities your community sets for structuring the project, promoting it, and even the degree of engineering effort you’ll invest into certain features. For example, if your project runs in a datacenter or on a cluster of servers, your audience will typically be a business audience—people running IT professionally (or as a volunteer in a university). For a mobile application or a web development framework, the majority of your audience will be running your project on their personal computer, workstation, or cellphone. Each of these groups has different resource prerequisites, and the problems motivating their use of the project and its tools are different.

Moreover, anyone interested in developing an open source product strategy should think additionally about the critical relationship between project users and product buyers. A company’s path to adopting open source doesn’t usually follow a straight line from use of an upstream open source project to conversion to an enterprise open source product. Open source adoption tends to be "grassroots," bottom-up; enterprise open source products are often evaluated and purchased top-down. Those adopting an open source project inside a company can be valuable influencers when consulting on purchasing decisions—if they’re connected to the purchasing process, or if the person responsible for purchasing is aware that the company is already using the product.

How do you engage with your user base today?

Once people are turning up to your project, engagement is key to growing the project’s user base and community. You can engage with users in multiple ways, each requiring different degrees of effort and resulting in differing outcomes.

Figuring out where you should focus your efforts can be difficult. So it’s useful to take stock of all of the ways you’re currently engaging with project users in order to identify blind spots and opportunities for improvement. Consider characterizing engagement techniques as "low-," "medium-," and "high-touch" (terminology borrowed from sales). Low-touch methods represent very little interaction between potential users and your community, while high-touch methods represent one-to-one or one-to-few efforts.

Here are some examples of the types of things you can categorize this way:

- Low touch: Website, documentation, online training, newsletters, podcasts, blogs

- Medium touch: Mailing list, bug tracker, community forum, conference presentation, webinars, user groups

- High touch: Phone calls, one-on-one or one-to-few training, conversations at conferences, community meetings

Ideally, your project will have a healthy mix of each of these. Working on your website, documentation, and promotional materials allows new users to act autonomously and without much help from a senior community member. Your bug tracker, mailing list, and forum provide opportunities for community members to engage with your community, ask questions, and provide feedback. This kind of activity provides an opportunity to learn more about how people are using your project. Finally, high-effort activities like training, conference booth attendance and follow-up, and in-person conversations can be extremely valuable on a one-on-one basis—but those techniques do not scale well.

The "sales funnel" model may be useful to communities thinking about engagement activities and project goals.

Low-touch activities are good for raising awareness of your project and getting people to look at it for the first time. Ensuring your web site and other materials clearly communicate what the project does, how it can help users, and how contributors can try it out and get started quickly is paramount. Medium-touch activities are great for creating a "center of gravity" around your project—not only making communication with users possible but also enabling those users to help each other (hopefully generating a network effect). And high-touch activities are great for building relationships with key community users, gathering community case studies, and helping larger groups be productive with and become advocates for your project.

A key consideration for groups crafting potential engagement pathways is how someone unfamiliar with the project might start using it and, over time, gain seniority in the project to the point of becoming a core contributor.

What alternatives to your project already exist?

You can tell a lot about a project by assessing who that project competes with, or what other projects people use to accomplish the same (or similar) tasks. Consider asking:

- If your project doesn’t have any competition, why is that the case?

- Is it in an area of emerging technology?

- Are people using similar projects to do work they could accomplish with your project—just in a different way?

- If other projects do the same job, but have no clear leader, how are they approaching the problem differently than you are?

- If your project has open source competitors, is joining them (rather than trying to compete with them)an option? If not, why not?

- If a competitor is an incumbent in the market, what can you tell about them and their customers?

- Who are your competitor’s customers? What do they have in common?

- What are people’s motivations for using a competing project?

Analyzing your competition can help you begin answering a number of key questions early in a project’s goal-setting process, and answering these questions will help when your community begins prioritizing features and deciding how to contact potential users. Perhaps, for example, you can piggy-back on existing gatherings between people already interested in a competitor’s technology and spread your message there. Or if you’re an upstart disruptor, your goals and messaging may be anchored to your competition: "cheaper than," "an open source alternative to," "simpler and faster than." If you’re in a new market and your project is involved in a "land grab," you’ll need to focus on spreading your message fast—which means a higher marketing budget or more aggressive community plan, and more focus on defining the problems you solve for potential users.

Can you work closely with adjacent projects?

If your software is frequently consumed with or is particularly useful to users of another project, then you may see opportunities for growing awareness of your project in its early stages and better understanding your users' needs. For example, Ceph can manage storage for OpenStack or Kubernetes; for Ceph, then, OpenStack and Kubernetes are adjacent communities. Catering to adjacent projects to find an audience may affect your technology roadmap, the events you target, the effort you put into specific integration projects, and so on. An adjacent project provides you with a potentially friendly audience who have the same problems your technology solves, so you can engage in some joint market research or UX testing, or coordinate joint events to meet and engage with potential users. This is also connected to understanding your competition; the communities important to them will also be important to you.

What are your goals for the project?

The existential question for every open source project is: "Why does this project exist?" Specifically, for a project released by or driven by a vendor, that question becomes: "What do we want to achieve by investing in this project?"

Surprisingly, many projects have difficulty answering this question.

As a vendor, ask: Why did you open source this piece of software in the first place? Are you trying to grow a market, promote a standard, disrupt a competitor, or increase demand for another product in your portfolio? Each of these requires a different message and different set of investments.

Understanding the reasons for open sourcing your project will help you clarify the investment required to achieve your goal remain aligned across engineering, product, and sales teams down the road. In the absence of a strong common vision for the project’s goals, you may find yourself under-funding the open source project, in part because of perceptions that it competes with products you build on top of it. A good open source product strategy provides clarity on which markets you are targeting, the market segmentation between product and project, and the role that the project plays in your entire business strategy and product portfolio. Clarifying these things will pay dividends in future discussions concerning the technical roadmap, or the relative prioritization of community promotion versus sales lead generation.

Who are your key stakeholders?

A small number of people who will care deeply about your project, and can represent a group of people or interests which affect the project. These people are your stakeholders.

In the case of vendor-sponsored projects, this group typically includes an engineering lead, product management, product marketing, and a representative of the field (field engineer, sales). You may also want to include in this group someone from your content services or support organizations and someone from product security. This is the group of people you will brief to prepare a stakeholder review, and you should gather them once every six to 12 months to check in on the state of the project and ensure alignment on the goals and the required investments to achieve those goals.

Results

Answers to these seven questions can furnish a single-page document that forms a baseline, a frame of reference, for any project planning conversations. After running this exercise, your team or community should share some understanding of the problems your project solves, and for whom. You will be able to communicate the value of your project in language that makes sense in your potential users' frame of reference. You will understand how your project fits into a market, and what you want to achieve with it there. Finally, you will have identified the key group inside your organization who should be aligned on your current status and future strategy.

Combining the answers to these seven questions, next steps for your project should become obvious to all involved—and your community will be ready to help your project succeed in achieving its goals.

Conclusion

This chapter covered the basics of what an open source community is and why different types of people and organizations participate in them. Then it discussed making the decision to start a new open source community, and finished with the process for setting your new project’s goals.

New Project Checklist

This is a relatively simple checklist for you to consider when starting a new open source project, especially where the project may be starting small but wants room to grow. By simple we mean: this list doesn’t propose a process or project management for accomplishing these items; in its most simple form it does not have definitions for items; it suggests what is to come without prescribing or demanding obedience to the list.

These are separated out into several different lists, depending on the area covered:

Goals of project

- Technical problem addressed by the project

- Intended users and value proposition

- Establish beginning roadmap w/milestones

Market positioning

- List of related/similar projects

- Why a net-new project?

- Key differentiators

Project name

- Compile & vet candidate list

- Logo design

- Legal review (if required)

- Reserve name (domain name, GitHub, social media handles, etc.)

Licensing & legal

- Document license criteria

- License selection

- Need ™ or other mark registration?

Governance

- Define officers & their responsibilities

- Org structure, voting reqs & process

- Rules for amending governance

- Rules for contribution, committer status

- Provisions for sub-projects & lifecycle mgmt

- Privacy policy

- Code of conductr

- Foundation membership options, if planned

Project infrastructure

- Mail tool (and moderators)

- Forum/Chat (and moderators)

- Doc repository (slides, planning docs, etc)

- Web conferencing platform

- Community calendar (tool + who will maintain)

- Public website and website maintenance

- CI/CD, dev & test environments

- Lab requirements, how they will be acquired

- Code contribution tools and process

- Project documentation platform

Ownership and financing

These items may be ignored if donating project assets to a foundation

- Website URL

- Logo

- Social media handles

- Web conferencing platform (if paid)

- Process for funding project needs

Launch planning

- D&I plan

- Community health and metrics vision/plan

Creating an Open Source Product Strategy

"Should we open source this project?"

This chapter won’t answer that question for you. But it will outline some considerations you should make as you answer the question when it arises.

First, ask yourself why you are considering an open source approach. Before committing to creating and maintaining an open source project, understand why open sourcing the project will help you or your organization achieve certain goals. Identifying those benefits is the first step in creating an open source strategy.

Understand the economics of open source

Open source is not a business model. It is a way to develop software collaboratively and increase a project’s distribution and reach by lowering acquisition costs. To understand the business rationale that makes an open source strategy appealing, consider these economic principles:

Reducing the price of a good increases the demand for it

In the case of open source, lowering the cost of acquisition maximizes demand and, therefore, project adoption. Note that the cost of adoption is not only monetary; it also includes the time and effort needed to adopt and migrate from whatever solution you’re currently using.

When the price of one good decreases, demand for its substitutes also decreases

Open source projects can undermine established proprietary software companies by being convenient to adopt at a lower cost. This principle explains how open source can be an agent for market disruption. Disruption is an opportunity to capitalize on the adoption of alternatives and grow another market.

All else being equal, when the price of a good decreases, demand for its complements increases

Every successful commercial open source strategy is based on this principle. If your goal is revenue, then you will need to determine the complements to the software that you 'll be releasing as open source. Those complements should provide additional value to customers.

When establishing an open source strategy, your goal is to connect these principles with a concrete business goal.

Define your team and the field

Creating a strategy requires input and buy-in from multiple stakeholders.

- Strike a balance between involving too many people at an early stage and ensuring buy-in from a diverse group of people from the start.

- Organize your stakeholders using a model of growing, concentric circles. Identify a core team that shares draft proposals early and often and engages with additional groups to gain awareness of concerns or constraints. Involving these stakeholders early will help you catch and address deal-breaking issues early.

- Ensure that all stakeholders share an understanding of the problem your work is addressing. Develop your understanding of both the landscape in which the project operates and the relative benefit of investing in one option over others.

Generate a draft strategy proposal

Next, compose a strategy proposal document. It should contain:

An elevator pitch

A high-level description of the open source project’s goal and a short explanation of how the project benefits the sponsoring company. No two projects will have identical goals, so no two projects will share exactly the same product strategy.

A business rationale

A definition of how success for the community project translates into success for the company or product team. For example, "Wide adoption of this project will help people glean more benefit from our other products," or "An open source reference implementation of a standard will encourage adoption of the standard by multiple companies, enabling a network effect for others building on top of the standard."

A high-level execution plan

Including key performance indicators (KPIs) that will be important for determining success. Project goals suggest these KPIs. For example, if your goal is de facto standard implementation with wide adoption, then you might measure the number of vendors distributing standard-compliant implementations. If your goal is market education, then the performance of introductory documentation, learning paths, tutorials, and magazine articles will be your top priority.

Move from strategy to action

Strategy documents are useful if they affect action by allowing individuals to make local decisions in support of global goals. Communicating your strategy is therefore crucial to achieving strategic ends. Everyone should understand how their work impacts the open source strategy. When the entire organization understands the project’s goal, reaching consensus on budget and resource allocation is much easier.

1. Continually monitor and communicate progress toward project goals. .* If fostering a diverse group of codevelopers is your community goal, then celebrate contributions from new participants and include growth figures in your monthly newsletter.

2. Allocate resources in a way that makes success possible. .* If your goal is to move an entire industry from a proprietary competitor to an open source project, and you have one person working part time to promote the open source project, then your chances of success are low.

3. Ensure that your strategy is a living document. .* Revisit it regularly with key stakeholders to ensure that your open source strategy stays fresh and relevant.

Crafting an open source strategy requires representing all key constituencies in the development process to achieve buy-in, exploring reasons why open sourcing makes sense for the organization 's goals, ensuring you are measuring the right things to gauge your success, and preparing to pivot if necessary. Do all of this well, and you can turn everyone involved into an advocate for the open source project.

Attracting Users

This section gives important, highly useful, and timely advice on some of the most important parts of what makes an open source software project successful. We put them in this section with the goal of helping to attract users, rather than saving, for example, communication or diversity considerations as later steps in the engagement toward contributor.

This guidebook says the way to grow a contributor community is through user adoption. There are a few succinct reasons why.

One is a sheer numbers argument: the larger the pool of people, the more will become interested in participating, then contributing. The more diverse the pool of people, the larger it can be. That is, if only men feel welcome in your project, you have reduced the size of your pool of users/contributors to less than half of the population of humanity.

Expert contributors rarely arrive suddenly and ready to contribute. More people become contributors through a pathway of becoming a user of the software first, then participating in the wider user community, and eventually becoming a starting contributor. After some time (short or long), their expertise is realized within the community. More people who start this pathway means more people will complete it.

Diversity and communication also come at the front of a project. Communication is important for sharing with the world what your software does and why they should use it; and to capture their feedback in effective forums. Diversity and inclusivity are goals that provide strength for innovation, resilience, and long-term sustainability. If your community doesn’t look like this world, it won’t last long in this world.

A way to think of this is: The first time someone sees your community has a formal Code of Conduct and diverse faces in leadership should be the first time they visit your website. The people who most need to see themselves represented in the community already—to know they are going to be safe physically and emotionally in joining—are going to make their decision about how welcoming your community is from the first time they visit your project website. Without these sort of elements visibly part of the culture, these folks are going to be long gone before considering becoming involved as collaborators and contributors.

This section contains chapters that:

- Help you understand the basic elements of an open source project that intends to have a community of users and contributors.

- Explain how to communicate effectively in and around an open source project.

- Give some essential steps to turn interest into users.

- Show you that building a diverse community starts with being inclusive from the beginning, in what every end-user sees and experiences.

This section is useful for you if:

- You want to understand more about the perspective of this guidebook that attracting users is the first part of building a contributor community.

- You are looking for a source or reference for a list of key elements of an open source project, whether you are building one or researching the viability of one, or for another purpose.

- You are looking for some tips and tricks to get more users to your software.

- You have been frustrated trying to attract contributors of one, another, or all types.

- You are convinced you need a more diverse and inclusive community, and are looking for help in making that happen, such as convincing others or starting up programs.

- You are not sure about this "diversity" thing and why it matters for open source software.

- You read the chapter before this one and you like to read a book from start to finish.

Communication Norms in Open Source Software Projects

Introduction

While the tools projects use to communicate continually evolve, best practices for communicating among project participants rarely change. This chapter will cover the basics of project communications and offer advice on serving a global audience by making the best use of particular tools and platforms. We’ll see how certain norms and techniques for maintaining productive communication in your community will ring true everywhere, regardless of the communication tools or platforms a project chooses. And we will conclude with some observations on the ways ever-changing tooling and communication practices in open source projects may present challenges for the outside observer—particularly academic researchers—along with recommendations for mitigating those challenges in a way that benefits all project participants.

The evolution of communication platforms in free and open source software projects

As the number of free and open source software projects has increased over time, the communication tools projects use—both to connect with their users and to coordinate their developers and contributors—have evolved. Internet Relay Chat (IRC) was once the default choice for real-time project chat. Many large projects conducted development discussions solely via their electronic mailing lists, Freshmeat was the place to hear about new project releases or updates to existing projects. Discussions about feature design and project improvements occurred via email and were included in a project’s mailing list archives.

Today, the landscape has shifted in multiple ways.

While real-time chat is perhaps less common today, projects have not forgone it entirely. Many projects have simply adopted services that are considered more user-friendly or accessible, for example, Gitter, Slack, RocketChat, and others. A project may even use a tool to bridge back to older chat systems such as IRC in order to help a community evolve to include newer services.

Some communities still employ email for asynchronous communications, and others have found they can achieve better results by offering their users the opportunity to collaborate in online forums, a format more familiar to many developers who began coding at the same time they were sharing news and perspectives on then-new and popular forum sites like Reddit and Imgur. Forum advocates find the visual layout more appealing, and forum administrators often prefer the medium’s fine grained access controls easier to use for moderation. (For example, being able to stop all posts in a particular thread during a heated discussion is relatively easy via most forum software—not so with mailing lists.)

While Freshmeat remains active (now renamed to Freecode), free and open source software projects have also made extensive use of social media services like Twitter and Facebook to interact with their user and developer communities. Social media serves as an excellent vehicle for project marketing and keeping audiences abreast of major project developments.

Social media also provides a vehicle for:

- Advertising upcoming events

- Live streaming of content or talks

- Generating interest in a project

- Other forms of marketing and outreach that broadcast further than a project’s newsletter, website, or blog.

- And many users now expect to receive basic technical support via these platforms.

While mailing list archives may no longer serve as a definitive record of project discussions, GitHub's popularity as an online development and collaboration platform, has meant many projects now manage their development discussions via GitHub issues. GitHub’s issues can have tags to differentiate, for instance, between discussions addressing implementation of a new feature and those reporting that the software does not work as intended.

And yet while the tools free and open source projects use to achieve communication are rapidly evolving, the human needs for both information and a sense of connection have not changed.

Project communications: The basics

What great communication accomplishes

People must understand the "who," "what," "where," "when," "why," and "how" of working with an open source software community. Thoughtfully established and well-maintained communication channels enable open source project and its participants to:

- Establish shared understanding of what the software it is, why people may wish to use it, and how they can get started doing so.

- Educate the community about how to use the software and how to contribute to the project.

- Keep people informed about project events (like a conference or webinar) and developments (like a new software feature, the formation of a working group, or the arrival of new contributors).

- Preserve knowledge about the project’s decision-making norms and practices.

- Allow users to report an error with the open source project’s software itself and to submit fixes for errors they or others uncover.

- Build a sense of common interest and purpose amongst participants, and provide an outlet for people in the project to socialize or "hang out" together online.

- Provide a location for contributors to the project to collaborate, be it on documentation for the project or to discuss how a particular part of the code base should be refactored.

Know your audience(s)

As you develop project documentation and other informational resources, recognize this work has several different audiences. Understanding these audiences and prioritizing their unique needs can help you craft better materials.

For example, consider the basic distinction between project users and project developers. Someone interested in using the software will be interested in things like how to install it, how to configure it, and what they need to know to accomplish the task at hand (e.g., build a website). Developers will also be interested in such details, but will need additional detail if they are going to contribute effectively to the project.

If your project observes certain coding conventions, be sure to include those conventions in the developer documentation. Having a patch rejected by a maintainer because you haven’t indented code a certain way can be rather demotivating. Users, however, likely won’t need these details.

Develop a style guide for your project and make sure it is easy to find in your developer-oriented documentation. Not every project will create its own style guide, but it is best practice to note what coding conventions the project will observe. If the project uses a previously published style guide, make sure to link to it in the developer documentation. [2]

The virtual showcase: crafting your project’s website

When people are looking for information about software that may help them solve a problem, their first stop will likely be the project website.

A project website needn’t be intricately designed to be effective (though a more attractive site aids with project marketing). A thorough README.md file on GitHub can work well as a project website, provided the information it offers gives users and potential contributors a sufficient overview of the project. A basic project website should feature at least the following sections.

Project overview

Include a simple overview of the project in an easy-to-spot location on the project website. This project description should include what the code base is designed to do and what problems someone might solve by using it. Making this information succinct and easy to find is critical. Post a quick description on the project’s home page so that interested parties immediately discover if the project is designed to meet their needs.

Think of this information as the opportunity to explain to someone who has never heard of your project why it could matter to them—in 30 seconds or less. For example, Drupal’s about page describes the project this way:

Drupal is content management software. It’s used to make many of the websites and applications you use every day. Drupal has great standard features, like easy content authoring, reliable performance, and excellent security. But what sets it apart is its flexibility; modularity is one of its core principles. Its tools help you build the versatile, structured content that dynamic web experiences need.[3]

In this description—just a single paragraph—we learn:

- What Drupal is (a content management system).

- What a content management system is (a tool to build websites).

- Why Drupal is a compelling choice (easy to use, reliable, secure, and flexible).

Let’s take another example from a popular project: Kubernetes.

When visiting the project home page, kubernetes.io, a visitor immediately sees the following explanation:

Kubernetes (K8s) is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. It groups containers that make up an application into logical units for easy management and discovery. Kubernetes builds upon 15 years of experience of running production workloads at Google, combined with best-of-breed ideas and practices from the community.[4]

In this description, we immediately learn:

- What Kubernetes is. (It’s a system for working with containerized applications, including deployment, scaling and management.)

- How Kubernetes is abbreviated. (Little details like this one immediately deepen the comfort level of new arrivals; no one is expected to already know an arcane acronym upon arrival.)

- Where Kubernetes was developed. (Google is noted as the originator of this code base, establishing the project as focused on enterprise applications and providing confidence that the software is well designed and maintained.)

- Kubernetes is open source. (A user can expect to use, run, modify, and share changes to the code base; any questions about barriers to entry due to licensing fees, procurement processes, etc., are dismissed.)

- The project values community engagement. (One can expect that contributions of code, documentation, etc., are welcome and encouraged.)

Getting started

The processes for creating good "getting started" documentation—occasionally called "onboarding documentation"—are outside the scope of this chapter. (Refer to the dedicated onboarding chapter in this guidebook for more detail.) Here, suffice it to say that open source project websites should feature a section aimed at helping new users and potential contributors get started using the software. Clearly labeling that section "getting started" or "new users" makes finding that section easy when people need it. Further differentiating between "new users" and "new contributors" in your onboarding documentation is even better, as these two audiences have very different needs. Clearly pointing to these resources for newcomers on the project website helps to keep the project’s other communication channels—like the forums and real-time chat rooms—free from frequently repeated inquiries about how to get started.

In your project’s "getting started" guide for new users and participants, include any information you can about other places those unfamiliar with the project can get help. For example, you may have a Slack channel called "newbies" staffed by folks who enjoy mentoring and helping people get started, whereas ongoing development discussions may take place in the "developer" channel.

Frequently asked questions

Another excellent location to feature basic information about your project is a frequently asked questions (FAQ) page. If project development is just beginning, a basic FAQ detailing what the project is, what the code base is used for, and how someone can get access to the code is sufficient. However, as more people join the project—new users, developers, documentarians, etc.—you will likely find yourself answering the same basic questions repeatedly. (And in the process you’ll discover that many aspects of the projects are not as obvious to newcomers as they are to you.) These repeat questions represent opportunities to improve your documentation and to seek help from your community.

Keep your FAQ updated and easy to locate. But even better: ask community participants to help you improve it. When answering a question for a newcomer, be it via email on the project mailing list or in real-time chat, ask the newcomer to write up the question and answer for inclusion in the project FAQ. By asking for help from your community, you do several things:

1. Get help keeping your documentation relevant and timely.

2. Demonstrate that community contributions to the project are welcome and encouraged.

3. Invite further contribution from someone who has already shown interest in the project by asking for their help.

Ideally, newcomers would have the ability to edit the FAQ themselves. Sending instructions for how to edit the FAQ along with your request to contribute to it—thus lowering the barrier to entry—makes receiving a contribution more likely. If your project maintains a contributors list, make sure to include the people contributing to your FAQ in it. People love seeing their work and contributions (however small) acknowledged. Doing so gives contributors a sense of belonging and commitment to the project. People who feel their work is appreciated and respected are more likely to stick around and contribute to the project, whether by filing issues or adding new features.

Document project goals and non-goals

Your project’s website should also make clear the purpose of the project and the activities the project has as its focus. People have difficulty understanding how they can best fit into a community and how they can contribute if they do not understand what activities are currently in progress and what is planned for the future.

One common tool to communicate these goals is a project roadmap. Even if your project does not yet have sufficient resources to develop this kind of roadmap, you should still find some way to ensure users and would-be contributors understand the project landscape. For instance, a weekly recap of project activities and planned activities for the coming week or month is an excellent start, and it’s something you can offer through a quick blog or forum post. Such works are an excellent resource for newcomers orienting themselves to the project and are a wonderful place to point interested parties to learn more as part of their onboarding process.

Communicating your project’s non-goals is equally important. Due to the vibrant nature of open source projects, it is only natural that someone will find a use for a project that the project’s creators never intended and will wish to extend the project’s capabilities to target that specific use case. If the project maintainers do not intend for the project to have a wider focus than what is already offered, letting these would-be contributors know this in advance will save everyone time and disappointment. In this era of easy forking, it is relatively easy for those who would use some parts of the project but not others to develop and maintain a code base that better matches their own needs—all without asking the maintainers of the original project to deviate from their intended vision and the project scope they’ve set.

Documenting non-goals is also particularly important for commercially focused projects, where a contributor’s desire to create a feature as open source may be in conflict with vendor goals for creating proprietary features. Contributors may still choose to create that feature as open source, but they should know from the start that upstream maintainers do not intend to include their work as part of the project’s code base. Some may choose to not implement the feature, knowing that a vendor is creating it for them; still others may choose not to implement the feature if they know it will not be included in the project’s mainline source tree, as they do not wish to incur the burden of ongoing maintenance themselves. And others may choose to go ahead and create something that works well for them and release it as open source, regardless of whether the feature is incorporated into the project’s main source repositories.

Most important here is that no one feels surprised by the direction a project will take. No project needs to accept every contribution, but having contributors invest time and energy into developing something only to discover it will not be accepted due to a conflict with an unknown roadmap (commercial or otherwise) creates tension in the community and a lack of trust in the project maintainers. It can even encourage adoption of open source alternatives to the vendor’s product.

Not working as intended: Getting the most from the issue tracker

This section details how an issue tracker can be used as an essential communication tool.

What is an issue tracker?

An issue tracker (sometimes also known as a bug tracker, issues list, or issue queue) is a tool that allows people to submit reports when they encounter instances where they believe the software is not working as intended.[5] As a way to monitor pending tasks and allow for collaborative commenting and review of work in progress, some projects manage their entire development workflow via their issue trackers.

In this section, we’ll discuss using an issue tracker for the purpose of reporting failures with the software. By reporting your issue using a project’s issue tracker, you ensure maintainers who are looking out for problems see your report and act upon it.

Why file an issue?

While filing an issue may seem more cumbersome than simply asking for help in real-time chat, it is important to do for several reasons:

Project contributors cannot keep track of all conversations occurring across various platforms, but they can always refer to the issue tracker to improve the project.

Real-time chat and social media are ephemeral communication channels. The issue tracker is a purpose built tool for recording and reviewing problems with the software. Software projects often define their upcoming work plans by using their issue tracker as a key component—and perhaps their sole tool—to prioritize all possible areas to work on. (Simply put, the project’s issue tracker is very often synonymous with the project’s to-do list.) If your problem does not make its way into the issue tracker, it will likely not be addressed simply because a very busy person has forgotten the details of the problem. For this reason, you will often find that one of the first requests you receive when asking for help is to file an issue so the project maintainers can keep track of the problem.

Filing an issue allows you and the project contributors to communicate asynchronously about the problem, as all parties can refer back to and access the issue description and follow up comments at any time.

When you’ve uncovered a problem with the software, you might discover that the problem is actually the root cause of another problem, or there may be a way in which several problems are related. Issue tracking software allows project developers to group related issues together, which may aid in diagnosing a problem’s root cause.

People often encounter the same issues with software, and many of them are filing issues with the project. Having multiple reports of the same problem can be very time consuming for the project maintainers, as they then need to respond to each individual reporter about work in progress. Fortunately, issue trackers make this process easier for maintainers by allowing them to quickly close issues by stating they are duplicates of an existing one (and then asking the bug reporter to track work-in-progress in the "original" report).

Project maintainers can then engage in broadcast-style communication to everyone experiencing the problem in one place, streamling their workflow while still helping everyone who needs assistance.

Make the issue tracker findable

Make sure the location of your project’s issue tracker is prominently displayed in your FAQ, as well as in your usage and development documentation. If people cannot figure out where to submit an issue, they will ask someone in the project where to do so. Supporting well-meaning users by offering repeated answers to basic questions like this one can be quite time consuming.

Do yourself and your community a favor and make your issue tracker very easy to find.

Use issue templates

Not everyone who uses your software will be familiar with your community’s conventions for filing a useful bug report. To save you and the bug reporter time, offer an issue template to ensure you receive the information you need to reproduce the reported error and effectively triage it. For example, you may need to know what version of the software or what operating system was in use when an error occurred. If common information is required for reproducing errors, ask for it in an issue template.

Common fields in issue templates include a summary of the issue, steps to reproduce it, the actual behavior the user observes, the intended behavior for the software, and a request for log files or screenshots to help guide the issue reviewer in better understanding the bug report. Several issue trackers support templates for bug reports, including GitHub, GitLab, Redmine, and Trac.

If you find yourself asking for the same information over and over again in response to different bug reports, then congratulations. You have uncovered an area of your template in need of improvement.

Help wanted: labeling issues for clarity and encouraging contribution

Most modern issue trackers allow users to label issues they file, which can be useful for organizing project work. By differentiating between different types of requests—features for development, software errors, etc.—a project’s maintainers can be more organized and triage issues more efficiently. Further, many people interested in contributing to open source software projects are looking for issues on which they can work to better understand the project’s development mechanics. If you will actively use labels in your issue tracker, make sure to document the label definitions in your development documentation so those labels are used consistently (or restrict the addition of issue labels to project maintainers only). A list of labels used inconsistently is no more helpful than a list of undifferentiated issues.

Labeling issues as "for newcomers" or "help wanted" allows project maintainers to flag issues particularly suited to contributors who have just joined the project. Labeling issues in this way shows that the project is prepared to onboard new contributors and that maintainers welcome community assistance in a particular area. Don’t be afraid to file issues against project documentation, the website,or anything else you feel is amiss. If there’s a place current and potential contributors can help make the project better, file these in your issue tracker with a clear label that shows them they can contribute.

Just make very clear (either in the text of the "help wanted" issue or via a link to other project documentation) how you wish others to engage with the project when working on these types of issues. (The Apache Subversion Issues page is an excellent example of clearly articulating needs to the user community before they file an issue.) It is best to encourage contributors working on these issues to engage with the project maintainers along the way, so their contributions have a higher chance of acceptance into the project. Nothing squelches a contributor’s enthusiasm like showing up with a working solution to the stated problem only to be told their particular implementation will not meet the project’s needs.

Communicate clearly and kindly

Whether you are a user of the project reporting an issue or a project maintainer reviewing a pull request, it is always important to communicate about the issue clearly and kindly. When a tool is not working, the person using it can become frustrated. Likewise, a person developing a project as a hobby is unlikely to respond well to demands on their time to fix a problem they do not have. Remember to be gracious and thankful in your discussions with other project participants, as everyone sharing their knowledge is contributing to the project’s overall health and wellbeing.

When issues become the subject of heated debate

At times, the details of addressing a particular issue can cause tension or arguments within the community.

While healthy and respectful debate is part of any thriving project—software or otherwise—tempers can flare easily, and (as has been well documented)[6] people tend to behave with less civility online than they would in person.

If an issue has become especially contentious and discourse has become rude or inflammatory, restrict access to that issue for a stated period of time (say 24 to 48 hours) to allow people time to calm down, reflect, and state their argument in a more even-tempered and constructive manner.

Quick tips for filing issues

Thank the people creating the software for their time and energy, especially if you are new to the project. The individuals spending their (spare) time creating free and open source software for you to use are also people who want to know their time is valued and their work appreciated.

Include as much information as you possibly can about the error you have encountered. If the project uses issue templates, fill one out as completely as possible.

If you do not have the information requested or cannot determine how to get it yourself, simply note what you have attempted to do in order to get the information. These details help maintainers determine what they might need to do to assist you.

If a project does not use issue templates, look at other issues that have been "closed‒fixed" or at merged pull requests to see how other people have filed bug reports. If the issue was fixed, chances are quite good that you’ll be able to use these historical artifacts as examples of the sort of information necessary for reproducing an error. Replicate what you find in these reports and add more detail as you are able.

Quick tips for responding to issues

"While the size and skill of the development community constrains the rate at which tickets can be resolved, the project should at least try to acknowledge each ticket the moment it appears. Even if the ticket lingers for a while, a response encourages the reporter to stay involved, because she feels that a human has registered what she has done (remember that filing a ticket usually involves more effort than, say, posting an email)."

—Karl Fogel, Producing Open Source Software.[7]

Thank the submitter for filing the issue. Helping a project improve is an excellent contribution to that project’s health. Further, by being gracious, kind and welcoming, you encourage continued participation and contribution from the issue reporter.

When closing an issue as "won’t fix," explain why the issue will not be fixed. Maintainers shouldn’t feel compelled to accept every pull request or fix every reported issue, but they should at least let bug reporters know why they won’t be addressing certain issues.

In particular, if someone has submitted an issue along with code to fix a problem or implement a new feature, it is vital to tell them why their work has not been accepted by the project. Not doing so makes the contributor feel like they’ve wasted their time and should devote their energies to a different software project. In an ideal world, you are able to include a link to a published project roadmap that explains why the submission does not meet the needs of the project. (Refer to above.)

For new contributor submissions, fix minor issues with the patch yourself along with a note about what you fixed and why. Having a patch rejected for minor nits discourages additional contribution, and often it takes just as long to explain why a patch is being rejected as it does to make very small fixes. Such explanations are an excellent time to point contributors to additional project resources, such as your coding style guide, documentation on communication norms, etc.

For submissions coming in response to a "help wanted" issue, engage early and often with the person who has stated an interest in working on the issue. Doing so ensures that the contributor’s submission will actually meet the project’s needs. Further, by being available to and in regular dialogue with new contributors, you form a relationship with them that encourages mutual learning and increases the chances they will continue to contribute to the project’s ongoing work.

Having development discussions and other conversations in the issue tracker

Conventional wisdom in the early days of open source software development held that communities should not carry on development related discussions in the project’s issue tracker. Project communities instead preferred carrying on such conversations via mailing lists or in forums for a number of reasons:

- People following the mailing list were able to comment and express their views and needs without needing to parse through the issue tracker

- Forum or mailing list conversations were seen as better for asynchronous and long-form communications, and popular issue trackers in the 1990s and early 2000s were an unwieldy way to engage in actual discourse.

- Discovering why a particular technical decision was made when those details were buried in an issue tracker was difficult, especially since the issue would be in a "closed" state once the decision was made. Looking for a closed issue to explain the technical direction of the project was considered counterintuitive.

With the rise in popularity of GitHub as a one-stop platform for online development work, conversations in the project issue tracker have become mainstream. GitHub’s issue system visually mirrors the typically expected visual interface for forum software, making discussions in its system seem natural for those who began their development careers when online forums were first gaining popularity. Further, time and resources necessary for maintaining a Mailman instance or additional forum software as part of project infrastructure became cumbersome when all other infrastructure could be managed via a single tool. The addition of features such as the ability to "+1" an issue, set fine-grained controls on notifications for specific issues, and lock specific issues so that only project maintainers may edit it (while still allowing others to view the issue) made the move to discussions in the issue tracker more palatable and effective.

Nonetheless, interested parties should be able to follow discussions outside the project’s issue tracker. Only the most deeply interested and invested individuals will rigorously follow every issue update, making engaging with the project difficult for casual contributors. While excellent search capabilities in online issue trackers make finding closed issues easier, the flow of an issue discussion does not fulfill the same function as a narrative description of a particular implementation or an explanation of why a certain decision was made. Note, too, that some maintainers who are most intimately familiar with the project—those who can recall specific issue numbers for particular discussions with ease—will not always be available to help with the project work.

Preserving the knowledge about decisions in an easy-to-access way:

- Saves time for people working to uncover the why of project processes.

- Saves time for maintainers so they need not rehash history regularly.

- Ensures that critical details on how and why decisions were made are always available even as project membership changes.

If your project carries on most of its development discussions in the issue tracker, consider taking some small steps to highlight these discussions in other ways that will be most accessible and discoverable to interested parties and wider audiences in general.

For example, you may summarize the discussion of the issue in a blog, forum post, or project newsletter, thereby preserving cultural lore for the project while simultaneously informing the broader community about the change. If the project does not maintain a blog or other publication mechanism suitable for such a communication, consider adding a list of watershed issues to your project documentation so newcomers can quickly become familiar with these critical topics, and for ease of reference for long-time project participants.

Communicating well across the globe

English as the lingua franca of the internet

Though we live in a world where more than 6,500 languages are spoken, for historical reasons the primary language used for communicating on the Internet—and therefore, in major open source projects—is English. For users and contributors who are not native English speakers, this fact can raise significant barriers to participation. There are a few steps projects can take to help those for whom English is not their first language to more effectively participate in the project.

Prominently recognize community resources available in multiple languages

Should your project be widely adopted and grow to the point that it hosts communication channels in more than one language, make sure to list these resources prominently on your project’s website. Include on the project’s website a note that the project welcomes submissions from community members for resources that are not written in English. When the project receives such submissions act promptly to get them included in your project documentation.

As you would with any resource you point your community to, do your best to ensure the resource is helpful. If you are unable to vet the resources as helpful given currently available person-hours on the project, reference the fact that project maintainers have been unable to assess the resource themselves. Note you welcome feedback on its inclusion in the project’s documentation.

Be kind and welcoming regardless of English proficiency

As this chapter has stressed numerous times, kind and gracious communication with all those who participate in your project should be a default mode of behavior for interactions. The same holds true when communicating with people for whom writing in English is difficult. If you have trouble understanding what someone is saying or asking for, ask clarifying questions to let them know you will be happy to help them. Don’t simply ignore someone or tell them they are not welcome in the project due to limited proficiency in written English.

People who are not native speakers of English often begin their communication with the project with an apology for their poor English language skills. When receiving such a communication, thank the sender for writing and let them know you appreciate their efforts to communicate with the project. Where possible, point them to any resources that may be available to them in a language with which they are more familiar, for example a Spanish language forum or a Chinese language mailing list for the project.

Avoid idioms in written documentation

Every language features various phrases the actual words of which do not convey the intended meaning of the phrase, such as "over the moon" to mean extremely happy or excited or "raining cats and dogs" to refer to a serious downpour of rain. For those who grow up in a particular culture, the meanings of these phrases are obvious. But they can be confusing for those who lack the proper context for them. Rather than rely on idiomatic phrases, use plain language in written documentation to ensure the writing is most accessible to all people.

Expand acronyms and provide a glossary

While acronyms are a useful way for those completely familiar with a topic to save time and effort typing and speaking longer phrases, they obfuscate information for those less familiar with the topic. Further, acronyms are often overloaded, meaning that the acronym can expand several different ways depending upon the topic area. For example, someone completely new to a project may not understand that "LGTM" means "looks good to me" and that their work is therefore acceptable for merging into the project’s source repository. If you regularly use particular acronyms as part of communicating in your project, take the time to create a quick glossary of these terms. Updating this glossary is a quick and easy way for volunteers to contribute.

Actively seek participation from localization volunteers

As mentioned earlier in this chapter, project maintainers should always be clear about what kind of help they’re seeking from their communities. One key area in which to ask for help is the localization of documentation resources. Regardless of their skill level with software development practices, community members can actively grow the project and improve it by translating documentation, thereby making the project more accessible to more people and more potential contributors. Maintainers should be explicit about their desire to recruit contributors focused on localization.

Documenting your project’s communication norms

When people approach a new project, they seek to understand how they can best engage with that project and interact with its community. Be sure your documentation clearly outlines your project’s various communication channels.

Simply listing communication channels is not sufficient. Your documentation must make clear what each channel is used for, when to use a particular communication mechanism, and how people can expect to receive communications from the project and its community members through that channel. For example, a project with few maintainers who develop the work as a hobby project may wish to note on the project website that those developing the project do so in their spare time, so immediate responses to mailing list inquiries should not be expected. Someone whose hobby project is in use with enterprises might like to make explicit the notion that help is provided on a best effort basis. (Doing so sets expectations appropriately for those who are less familiar with how open source project communities function.)

Maintaining civil discourse

As has been discussed throughout this chapter, maintaining kind and gracious communications is vital for the project’s ongoing health and well-being. While assuming everyone understands what "kind and gracious communication" looks like may seem natural, one cannot assume a consistent meaning for all participants, especially when dealing with a global audience. Project maintainers and community members do well to lead by example. But it sets an appropriate tone for the project to make an explicit statement about what constitutes civil discourse, what matters are off-topic for the project, and what is expected from anyone communicating with the project, especially about matters that may cause conflict .

From the Diversity Statement of the Dreamwidth Project:^[8]^

"We welcome people of any gender identity or expression, race, ethnicity, size, nationality, sexual orientation, ability level, neurotype, religion, elder status, family structure, culture, subculture, political opinion, identity, and self-identification. We welcome activists, artists, bloggers, crafters, dilettantes, musicians, photographers, readers, writers, ordinary people, extraordinary people, and everyone in between. We welcome people who want to change the world, people who want to keep in touch with friends, people who want to make great art, and people who just need a break after work. We welcome fans, geeks, nerds, and pixel-stained technopeasant wretches. (We welcome Internet beginners who aren’t sure what any of those terms refer to.) We welcome you no matter if the Internet was a household word by the time you started secondary school or whether you were already retired by the time the World Wide Web was invented.

….

We have enough experience to know that we won’t get any of this perfect on the first try. But we have enough hope, energy, and idealism to want to learn things we don’t know now. We may not be able to satisfy everyone, but we can certainly work to avoid offending anyone. And we promise that if we get it wrong, we’ll listen carefully and respectfully to you when you point it out to us, and we’ll do our best to make good on our mistakes."

This excerpt from the Diversity Statement of the Dreamwidth project is an excellent example of how to document project communication norms. It is clear that everyone is welcome in the project, regardless of personal background, technical skill level, or focus for using the project. It makes it clear that mistakes will be made and that people are expected to use these imperfections as learning opportunities, not excuses to belittle other people. The statement tells users and would-be contributors that they may not always get what they want from the project maintainers, but that errors will be fixed and reasonable requests will be listened to, if not acted upon. Most notably, it’s a list of expected prosocial behaviors rather than simply a list of what not to do. It identifies behavior the project maintainers and community members model and transforms it from the actions they take into words that help everyone understand what actions constitute good project citizenship.

Developing a project social contract

As projects document their community communication norms, they may find developing a project social contract to be a particularly effective exercise. A project social contract documents behaviors the project expects all participants to display and sets expectations for how project members will be accountable to others. The social contract is not necessarily a list of forbidden behaviors, but rather a statement about how members of the project will choose to self-govern for everyone’s success. By undertaking the process of creating a social contract through dialogue, members establish empathy with one another and set the foundation for future conversations.

You can learn more about creating social contracts, including tips for doing so for remote teams, in The Open Practice Library.

Codes of conduct

Some projects use a code of conduct as a means to document their expectations around civil discourse. Open source projects that seek any outside contribution should always have a code of conduct. For projects that host events, whether virtual or in person, developing code of conduct specific language around events is also a best practice. Think of the code of conduct as an aspect of the project’s social contract, one that includes the rules by which the community will govern itself and how each member will hold one another accountable for those moments when they could have behaved differently and achieved a better outcome. These rules must be understood and made explicit. Otherwise people will know neither what is expected of them nor whether the project is a place where they will feel welcome and comfortable contributing their time and expertise.

Refer to this guidebook’s chapter on governance for more information about codes of conduct.

Successfully communicating with an open source project

So far, we’ve focused primarily on ways in which software project maintainers can ensure the best possible outcomes for communication in their projects. However, contributors, too, can take a number of steps to ensure they’re communicating effectively with their favorite open source communities. Here are just a few:

1. Read the project website and documentation before jumping into discussions.

1. Take the time to read about the project and understand its nuances.

2. Demonstrate that you respect the time and attention of the people producing the project.

2. Do your research, and tell people you’ve done it.

1. If you run into a problem using open source software, do what you can to solve the problem yourself. There’s no shame in not being able to solve the problem, and it helps your bug report.

2. Make sure to include what steps you have taken to resolve the issue when filing a bug report or asking for help in one of the project’s communication channels. Doing so saves people time and energy, as they will not ask you to try something you have already done.

3. Listing the ways you’ve already attempted to help yourself is a demonstration of respect for the time and energy of the project’s maintainers.

3. Practice basic netiquette.

1. Most fundamental advice for communicating on the internet is applicable in open source projects and communities.

2. For instance, avoid typing in all capital letters, as this style is read as shouting (and one would not go about asking for help by shouting at someone).

3. Choose a username or screen name that is reasonable and approachable, otherwise you risk not being taken seriously by others.

4. Wait a reasonable amount of time—say 24 to 48 hours—for a response to your inquiry before trying to get a response in a different communication channel.

5. You may find Virgina Shea’s oft-cited The Core Rules of Netiquette to be a useful resource if you are unfamiliar with the rules of engagement in internet communications.

4. Post questions and communications in the appropriate places.

1. Encountering information in a place people don’t expect can overwhelm them. For example, using a project issue tracker to let folks know you are hosting a hackfest next week is inappropriate.

2. If the project has taken the time to let contributors know how and where to ask questions—and you should know this by following the guidance in the first item on this list—make sure to use the appropriate forum to do so.

3. Demonstrating you have taken the time and energy to interact with the project’s maintainers and other volunteers in the way they’ve asked shows you respect their efforts and, in turn, makes helping you be successful much easier for them.

5. Make the subject of your posts as meaningful as possible.

1. When writing the subject line of an email or forum post, make your needs explicit.

2. For example, a subject line that says "I think I found a bug" is likely to be acted upon more slowly than one that says "external display not recognized upon upgrading to version 2.2."

1. The second subject tells the reader that they will likely find more detail on how to diagnose the problem, and that they are dealing with someone who understands the limited amount of time and attention the reader has.

2. The first subject does not differentiate the sender’s problem in any way, and makes it difficult for your communication to be memorable to the reader.

3. The more useful the subject of your post, the more likely you are to receive a prompt reply.

6. Be kind and courteous in all your communications.

1. Once more, let’s stress that the key to effective communication in any project—open source software or otherwise—is thoughtful and gracious behavior.

2. Do not show up at an open source project angrily demanding help for your problems, send impolite follow up messages when you do not get an immediate answer, or otherwise be unkind to the people with whom you are communicating.

3. Do take the time to thank them for their help and for providing the project to you and everyone else.

1. Remember you are communicating with other people, some of whom are spending their free time to write your free software.

2. Treat them with the respect and courtesy you want for yourself.

Evolving communications in open source projects and academia

While open source software now seems ubiquitous, we should recall that the free and open source software movements are still in their early stages. Development of the Linux operating system began in 1991. The Apache Software Foundation, steward of many of the world’s most notable open source projects, was incorporated in 1999. Though 20 or 30 years seems like ancient history on the internet, it is worth noting that Ada Lovelace created the world’s first algorithm back in the 1840s. Open source is still a blip (albeit a significant one) in a much longer technological timeline.

Due to open source’s disruptive influence in the software industry, academic researchers have found open source software projects and their development methodologies particularly worthy of study.

However, as projects' communication tools and platforms have evolved, researchers' ability to access project data for the purpose of study has been, at times, diminished. For example, parsing IRC logs of a project’s real-time chat often yielded fruitful information about a particular project, but as some projects have moved to other chat systems, such logs are no longer commonly available (nor has there been any guaranteed longevity of the project’s chat archives, depending on which communication tool the project chooses).

When a project launches or consists of a small group of people working together, choices for how to communicate and where to do so often arise organically and with little consideration to the future impact of those choices. But project maintainers should thoughtfully consider how they can ensure the project’s communications—which contain potentially rich sources of data and historical artifacts like lore and decisions histories—are effectively captured for both the project participants and interested observers. To understand how researchers benchmark community activity and analyse the outputs of various parts of your project, consider reviewing the work of the Community Health Analytics in Open Source Software (CHAOSS) Project.

Conclusion

The most effective way to achieve communication in open source projects is to show others kindness and courtesy, and to assume good intent upon first contact with people you’ve never met. Though this chapter contains any number of helpful best practices for effective communication, simply acting with graciousness to other people is the most important step one can take to communicate well. Remember there is a human being reading what you have written, and remember to treat them with the same respect you want for yourself.

To Build Diverse Open Source Communities, Make Them Inclusive First

Introduction

Mere months after the COVID-19 pandemic forced most tech teams to work remotely or not at all, the murder of George Floyd ignited a racial reckoning in the United States. This movement hit the tech sector especially hard. While companies released statements in support of racial justice and declaring that Black Lives Matter, their own representation—experience of Black employees—came under scrutiny, both internally and externally.

At first glance, open source seems immune to the multi-pronged problems with diversity and inclusion plaguing technology companies. Open source ecosystems operate online; contributors work across countries, languages, and timezones to power projects that drive technology forward. In some cases, people contribute purely out of love for these projects, not for free beer and stock. Given the prevalence of such altruistic intent, the thinking goes, open source is a true meritocracy, a space where all can thrive regardless of their pronouns or the color of their skin. But if there’s one thing that industry advocates love more than meritocracy, it’s data. And when the data shows who contributes to the open source ecosystem, it paints a damning picture.

This chapter offers an overview of efforts by various open source communities to make projects more diverse and inclusive. It also offers initial steps open source community managers and project maintainers can take to begin building communities and projects that benefit from a diverse contributor base. Most crucially, it argues that open source communities must practice inclusion before trying to find contributors from underrepresented groups. Without trying to fix the systemic barriers that prevent people from staying, efforts to diversify will keep failing in vain.

The state of open source diversity

In 2019, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found that 28.7% of total employed managers in the "Computer and Information Systems" sector were women. Of all managers in that sector, 9.6% were Black or African American, 15.8% were Asian, and 4.7% were Hispanic or Latino.

As this survey indicates, the managers in the technology industry in the United States are predominantly White and/or men. The open source communities skew even more toward contributors who are White and/or men. A 2017 GitHub survey of 6,000 open source users and developers found that 95% of randomly selected respondents were men. Three percent were women, and one percent were non-binary people.

How does this continue to happen? Recent years have seen an influx of diversity and inclusion (D&I) initiatives aimed at recruiting more diverse project contributors. The Linux Foundation has devoted an entire section of programming at its Open Source Summits to sessions on D&I. DrupalCon offers scholarships for attendees and speakers from underrepresented backgrounds. Several mainstage keynotes at All Things Open 2019 discussed diversity. With so much attention from community leaders, why does contributor data still paint such a stark picture?

Relative lack of open source activity from women and underrepresented minorities (URMs) seems surprising at first, but a closer look reveals some persistent problems regarding inclusion in open source communities. Inclusion is often used as a synonym for diversity; in fact, it is its own principle. To quote Meg Bolger, "Inclusion is about folks with different identities feeling and/or being valued, leveraged, and welcomed within a given setting (e.g., your team, workplace, or industry)." Some persistent, systemic barriers keep women and URMs from being included in open source communities. Without addressing and rectifying these systemic problems, diversity in open source won’t improve.

Let’s unpack three of those barriers: Lack of free time to contribute, a hostile online environment, and lackluster documentation.

Lack of time to contribute for free

Globally, women continue to earn less than White men for performing the same professional roles. They are also increasingly likely to be their homes' primary earners, and they’re more likely to do unpaid labor in the form of housework, childcare, and other domestic tasks.

As a result, they have less spare time to do even more unpaid work by contributing to open source communities. When they do make those contributions, they often do so during work hours—because they already work for organizations that let them do it.

Nisha Kumar (She/They) is the technical lead for container build, packaging, and distribution at the Open Source Technology Center at VMware. She also serves as co-maintainer for the Tern project, and a contributor to the SPDX and OCI communities. She juggles these projects with her role as her child’s primary caregiver. To Kumar, these dual roles are nothing new; as a girl growing up in India, she balanced schoolwork with chores, running errands, and caring for family members. These endless tasks left no time for her to pursue passion projects.

If not for her ability to work on open source during the day at VMware, she’s unsure if she could contribute today. Kumar told me:

"As a woman in tech contributing to open source in my day job and getting compensated for it, I find that I still don’t have the time to contribute to open source projects I am personally interested in or even volunteer for my local open source communities because I need to also take care of my child and household."

A hostile online environment

The internet is not an equally hospitable place. Women, people of color, and LBGTQ+ people are disproportionately targeted for online harassment, with women twice as likely to experience online sexual harassment as men. And this was prior to 2020.

The year’s confluence of a global pandemic and mass civil unrest has led to increased attacks against people of color, specifically Asian Americans and Black Americans. If attackers feel emboldened to hurt people in the flesh, it’s no surprise that this occurs online as well. If you work on open source projects with Black and Asian contributors, make no mistake: They are in pain.

"I don’t see any acknowledgement that the internet, in general, is mostly inhabited by white men who are hostile to women and URMs," Kumar says. "How would anyone expect folks who are in general harassed on the internet to suddenly trust an open source community to not behave the same way toward them, despite what its Code of Conduct document says?"

Kumar’s concerns are well-founded. Open source communities don’t have a reputation for making most feel welcome. For years, project maintainers have written calls for help, saying they "feel drained, unappreciated, and even abused" on their worst days. A 2017 survey of 6,000 GitHub contributors found that 21% left projects they were working on after experiencing negative behavior. With the odds of such behavior that much higher for people from underrepresented groups, it’s surprising they contribute to open source projects at all.

"Any time that I spend contributing to [open source communities] is time I could also be spending volunteering to advance LGBTQ equality, fighting against police brutality, and other issues that I care about, and that disproportionately affect underrepresented people—in fact, it’s what makes us underrepresented in the first place," explains Perry Eising (He/They), who works as a community manager at a for-profit tech company that hosts open source projects. "It’s challenging to justify to myself to spend time being involved in (sometimes hostile-feeling) OS and tech debates when I have so many causes that require my attention and efforts."

Incomplete, inadequate documentation

The barriers above manifest in perhaps the biggest barrier of all: Open source projects' lack of documentation. Quantitative data and qualitative interviews repeatedly share that most open source projects don’t prioritize or reward documentation. As a result, outsiders often have no clue how to help.

I speak from personal experience here. After speaking at the Open Source Summit in Vancouver two years ago, I found the community so warm and welcoming that I resolved to find a project with which I could help. Given my background as a writer of all stripes, I thought writing documentation would be the perfect place to start and make a meaningful impact. So you can imagine how my face fell when I created my first GitHub account, logged onto the platform, and was left totally lost by where to go next. With no knowledge of how to fork, merge branches, or make pull requests, I had no clue where to start—and knew the margin for error was high.

I’m fortunate to live in a city with an active tech community that hosts regular meetups for techies of all interests, including tutorials aimed at beginners. I made my first pull request in person at a conference, and then made most of my first several dozen GitHub contributions at in-person events. Only after attending several free, accessible events over several months did I begin contributing independently. Absent any of these privileges, I would not have spent hours alone trying to learn how GitHub works to make a PR that might—or might not—get accepted.

The same GitHub survey that found one in five open source contributors leave projects due to bad behavior also found that incomplete or confusing documentation was the biggest challenge. 93% of that survey’s respondents said they had encountered the problem, yet 60% said they rarely or never contributed to documentation. As a result, it’s hard for project veterans to read their own projects' documentation.

Imagine how this makes outsiders feel.

"Contributing to open source is not only a technical challenge but equally a social challenge," explains Nuritzi Sanchez (She/Her), a senior open source program manager at GitLab. "Documentation is needed to enable remote asynchronous collaboration, which is how communities work. If everything is stuck inside of people’s heads, that’s going to create an atmosphere of confusion, frustration, and inefficiency." Documentation isn’t just essential for code; it’s also a guide to understanding each project’s cultural and communication norms (refer to this guidebook’s chapter on communication norms for more on this subject).

Open source communities use asynchronous communication to work cohesively across disparate time zones. Without clear documentation, prospective contributors won’t know how decisions are made, where to contribute to the project, how teams collaborate, or why following certain processes is important. For prospective contributors who are non-native English speakers and/or have special needs, this lack of documentation makes contributing all but impossible. Inadequate documentation has far-reaching consequences. It shows a lack of transparency that wastes time, sows distrust, and prevents many open source communities from reaching their full potential.

Tips to build more inclusive projects and communities

Despite these barriers to entry, there’s good news for maintainers: You hold enormous power to improve your project’s culture by making it more inclusive. Community members, especially those from underrepresented backgrounds, have discussed the lack of diversity and inclusion for years. Now, it’s time for project maintainers to act by weaving inclusion throughout their project strategies—not making it an afterthought.

"[Diversity and inclusion] keynotes might have lofty ideals designed to raise awareness and some might even argue that they were useful at one point (maybe), but we’ve moved beyond that," argues Lisa-Marie Namphy [She/Her], who runs Cloud Native Containers, the world’s largest Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) user group. "Our communities are saying that it’s time to act! And action means a change of policies, fund initiatives, representation goals, so many things. The communities are asking for accountability, from the foundations who run them to the corporations who fund them."

If creating an inclusive community sounds overwhelming, remember that the community wants to help. If you’re a project maintainer yourself, you don’t have to do this work alone. In fact, taking the steps below with a trusted team will help improve your project for all.

Step one: Stop saying you’re a meritocracy

The first step to a more inclusive open source project involves understanding the meritocracy myth: The more you believe in meritocracy, the more biased your project is likely to be.

Why? Purely meritocratic projects don’t acknowledge that people enter on unequal playing fields. If an open source maintainer isn’t aware that women often have less time to contribute, or that LGBTQ+ contributors are more likely to endure online abuse, they won’t take steps to make the community more inclusive. As a result, they risk losing the diverse contributors they worked hard to recruit.

Terri Oda (She/Her) volunteers for the Python Software Foundation and Google’s Summer of Code, alongside her role as an open source security researcher at Intel. She says claims of meritocracy make her cringe. Why? Such statements cause maintainers to ignore opportunities to get more people involved in projects, even in cases where the open source community gathers in person.

"For example, say you’re running code sprints at a conference and want to increase the number of women," Oda says. "If you’re thinking about merit and skills, you’re going to wind up offering more intro to sprinting-type content. But if you look at the bigger picture, you might realize that the conference offers childcare during the main conference, but it stops when sprints start. Or that the venue isn’t in a safe area and the sprints run until after dark."

The first step to build a more inclusive environment is self-awareness. Open source contributors enter projects with a range of lived experiences that affect how—and if—they show up. Sitting with and reflecting on this fact is the first, most crucial step.

The next step is to take an honest look at your project’s current community, and take note of who is—and isn’t—there. If your project contributors all, or even mostly, look like you, that’s a huge red flag that an inclusive overhaul is in order.

Step two: Prioritize your project’s documentation

A 2019 Stack Overflow study found that about 41% of developers have less than five years of experience. Between these new technologists and current emphasis on STEM education, there are lots of opportunities to welcome new open source contributors. In order to do so, project maintainers must lower barriers to entry—and clear, concise documentation is the first step.

Zach Corleissen (He/They) is the lead technical writer for The Linux Foundation (LF) who recently revised a large architectural document for the LF Energy Foundation. He also serves as one of the co-chairs for the Kubernetes documentation special interest group (SIG Docs). Kubernetes was his first open source software project, and it quickly became one of the most prolific projects in modern open source. Its rapid growth allowed Corleissen to own important aspects of its documentation, and revise it to become more reader-friendly.

"Insisting that code is self-documenting is a form of gatekeeping [and] an example of an unhealthy project culture," Corleissen says. "I think the devaluation often comes from developers who see a static generator stack and think, 'How hard can it be?' One of my least favorite dismissive phrases: 'It’s just a pile of Markdown.' If only it were that easy! Documentation is code for an environment where no chipsets are identical; kernel defaults are hostile; RAM is variable; storage is subject to random external dependencies; and production regularly fails despite optimal conditions, or inversely, succeeds in spite of obvious CI failures."

To track progress, the SIG Docs group does a quarterly review where they measure the progress of their previous quarter’s goals and prioritize work for the upcoming quarter. One of their community rules centers on ownership: In order to adopt a goal, a project needs a specific person willing to drive it.

Step three: Create and enforce a clear code of conduct

If your project doesn’t already have a code of conduct (CoC), it’s never too late to make one (refer to this guidebook’s chapter on governance for tips of getting started). They are an expectation for modern open source initiatives, from long-term projects to two-day conferences.

In my own research for this chapter, several open source contributors told me they won’t consider joining new projects that lack clear CoCs. For these URMs, the risk of joining an unwelcoming if not hostile community is too high. "Having a code of conduct would be big for me," explains Natalie Zamani (She/Her), Senior Software Engineer at Apple. "And then something as seemingly unrelated as not tolerating project contributors espousing racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic ideas, even if it’s not related to their project work. I wouldn’t feel comfortable working with individuals who hold such views, full stop. And I’ve seen a few projects that would otherwise be interesting to me where that’s tolerated."

As the former President and Chairperson of the Board of Directors for the GNOME Foundation, Sanchez helped create GNOME’s event CoC. She says that while the Contributor’s Covenant is the default code of conduct for a lot of open source communities, translating it to an events format took some creative work—and a lot of feedback from the GNOME community.

"No matter the type of CoC you’re rolling out, having a transparent plan and timeline is key," Sanchez says. "At GNOME, we created a working group after one of our annual conferences to start drafting a code of conduct. We passed the notion of a working group by the Board of Directors to make sure that they were on board. They made a community-wide announcement letting people know the process: A working group would be drafting the CoC, sending it to community for revisions, the Board would then see the revised draft and vote, and then the membership would vote at the Annual General Meeting."

Despite the key role of community feedback, Sanchez says the CoC should be owned by a governing body within your project. CoCs remain a touchy subject in open source communities, and not all open source contributors believe they’re necessary. A governing body (or at least a committee) composed of diverse contributors that shares the creation process can help alleviate disagreements. Once you’ve created your governing body, assign members to own specific tasks. These include a chair who can break voter ties, moderators to enforce the code of conduct, and mentors to train the community. It’s essential for all community members—especially URMs—to see project leaderships protect their safety and integrity.

"I am a firm believer that signalling is very important, but that broken trust is difficult to repair," Eising explains. "Don’t signal to [underrepresented people] that you are ready to embrace them before you actually are—that’s like inviting someone who uses a wheelchair to a party on [an upper] floor with no elevator. That person won’t trust you again to think about their needs appropriately. Organizations need to look within and really assess before making a reach-out."

Step four: Reward contributions beyond code

In her time working on open source, Sanchez says that most projects focus on attracting contributors to a narrow set of project work: Engineering, design, translation, documentation, and outreach. Despite how broad that sounds, she says the table below reflects many more roles and types of contributions she’d like to see rewarded.

Use this table as part of your outreach efforts, focusing on specific career areas and development goals. Help people to see themselves as part of the project, showing how their skills and experiences in a career area can map to where they can contribute to the project.

Table 1. Aligning project role to career goals and skillsets

Career development target

Teams within OSS orgs to check out

Why

Sales and business development

Fundraising, partnerships

Both of these things require you to pitch the value of the open source community / project and require you to develop your communication and negotiation skills, among other things.

Marketing skills

Engagement, marketing, or outreach teams

Some projects may not even have this set up and are in need of someone to help. Even if you don’t have a lot of experience in this, you may have more experience than anyone else in that community and it’s your chance to build something from scratch. This could look really amazing on a resume!

Strategy skills

Board of directors / governance team, community team

It depends a bit on the maturity of the organization, but typically there’s a lot of room for building your strategy skills when on a board of directors. You have a birds-eye view of the project, typically have say over project finances, and can help define goals and move the project forward at a whole new level. Since you can’t get there right away, leading initiatives can help you build those skills and there’s often a lot of room for people to step in and own big chunks on open source community teams.

Data science skills

Community team, board of directors

What kind of data is being collected to ensure that initiatives are successful? Measuring a community’s health is something that more and more people are interested in and there’s a need for those interested in data analysis to help.

Graphic design skills

Marketing team, technical projects

There’s a lot of need for graphic design for brand and marketing initiatives, and in general to help make the project more mature. Some projects may not even have established brand guidelines, and there’s a big need for more designers in general.

Project management and program management skills

Engagement, marketing, outreach, documentation, community teams

There is a huge need for highly organized people who can create processes and structure. Many initiatives fall to the side because there isn’t someone to help push it along and make it happen.

Product management skills

Any technical project, new initiatives, website, newcomers initiatives

Product managers (PM) are essential at companies, and yet it’s something that isn’t always easily found within open source software. There’s a lot of room for PMs to jump in to help create more innovative products and help bridge the gap between communities and businesses, helping to expand each project’s reach.

Legal skills

Board of directors or community team

There’s a growing need for more people who are able to navigate open source related legal matters. Lawyers may get a lot of great experience working on community teams or sitting on the Board of Directors.

HR/people skills

Board of directors, community team, newcomers initiatives

We need people who care about people and want to make the community awesome.

This list isn’t exhaustive, nor is it applicable to all projects. For more on this topic, refer to this guidebook’s chapter on the range of roles in open source projects. The goal is to look at your own open source project’s holistic needs in the short and long terms, then recruit contributors to fill specific gaps. Doing so allows you to create a governing board with representatives that own specific aspects of the project and contribute to its growth.

Nithya Ruff (She/Her) leads the Open Source Program Office for Comcast and serves as Chair of The Linux Foundation Board. In more than two decades of open source work, she has seen how ignoring crucial skills—including legal issues such as copyrights and trademarks—can keep a project from achieving long-term success. Recruiting and rewarding diverse contributions also plays a key role in preventing burnout, which project maintainers have been increasingly vocal about.

"It is unfair to expect the maintainer or the developer who started the project or leads the project to care for all of these issues, [or] have the skills to do it," Ruff says. "All forms of contribution need to be valued [because this] brings diversity of people into the project, which makes the project more vibrant and innovative. Foundations like the Apache Software Foundation [and] Linux Foundation bring all of these contributions to the table for their hosted projects. This allows the project to more successfully build a broader ecosystem."

Step five: Mentor new talent to grow and lead the project

Eleven years after co-founding Redis, Salvatore Sanfilippo announced plans to step down as Project Maintainer of the NoSQL database. He named Yossi Gottlieb and Oran Agra as his successors to maintain the Redis project. In doing so, the Redis governance model got a refresh.

Rather than keeping Redis’s prior BDFL style, Gottlieb and Agra built a new, lighter governance model. It involves electing a small group of longtime Redis developers to act as core contributors and uphold the project’s Code of Conduct.

Regardless of your own project’s governance model, you must include a way to train key contributors to assume leadership roles. This achieves three key goals:

1. Helping new contributors learn how they can grow

2. Rewarding contributors who own key aspects of the project

3. Preventing maintainer burnout

This last point is noteworthy: Sanfilippo said when he stepped down from Redis that despite his passion for coding, he never aspired to maintain a project. Without new leaders to step up—and documentation sharing how contributors can assume such roles—maintainers risk either working on projects when they no longer want to or having the project stall. Likewise, the project risks missing an opportunity to give interested contributors a chance to step up.

The act of building and maintaining a mentorship program is inclusive in itself. Several open source leaders interviewed for this book said they see a clear need for more mentorship in open source at large, and a desire to do it themselves. In some cases, open source contributors believe so much in the power of mentorship that they restructured their contributions to include it. And, because they were mindful of their own time limitations, they offered flexibility to new leaders as well.

"My open source contributions definitely changed even before I became a parent," explains Oda. "As the coordinator for a global mentoring program that happens in the summer, I had to plan some years ahead to build a volunteer team that could do everything I do. So, I handed off some of my other projects more completely and never went back to them.

"Since new moms typically get less than one hour of free time per day, the key for me has been aligning the open source I want to do with the open source that work wanted to pay me for. I worked to take [the] CVE Binary Tool open source after I returned from maternity leave, and worked with my boss to make sure I could have time to mentor students as part of my maintainer role."

To build your own mentorship program, Sanchez says to focus on four actions and initiatives:

Create learning opportunities often. Find ways to help people learn what you do and how you do it. Don’t just wait for formal internship or mentorship programs, but take advantage of those if you can. Consider recording videos, holding AMAs, participating in events, etc. Be open to communicating with people informally in order to build relationships and trust so that you can help develop those with potential. Cast your net wide and you’ll probably find those gem contributors who are ready to step in to help bring your project to a whole new level.

Be a connector. Try to have a mental map of prominent contributors in your community and their strengths. Share the mentorship by introducing newcomers to several people. Burnout is real on the mentor side and you want to make sure that there are other people your mentee can reach if you need to take a break or just get busy.

Make sure that there’s a chat tool specifically for community interactions. In order to build trust, people need private spaces. Chat facilitates conversations and collaboration, and also allows people to message you directly. To avoid burnout, you may want to have a chat tool available just for your community / work conversations and a chat tool just for your personal life. That way, you can turn off all notifications on one tool if you need a break, or just simply have that mental separation thanks to differences in UX.

Connect through events. Events provide a powerful opportunity for you to connect with potential mentees. At these events, try to plan fun activities that are designed to help people connect informally. This may mean having a people-bingo where people have to ask each other questions to enter a raffle, or it could be a city tour, or a game night. Fun activities throughout the year can facilitate authentic relationships, which can also help people overcome fear of contribution.

For more ideas around mentoring in open source communities, refer to this guidebook’s chapter on building a culture of mentorship.

Step six: Commit to continuous improvement

The work of inclusion is never done: It’s ongoing. As your project grows, you will find new gaps to fill, questions to document, and additions to your Code of Conduct. As your community becomes more inclusive, it might feel like you’re finding more ways you’ve fallen short. Uncomfortable as this is, it’s actually a good thing. It means you’ve done the hard work of committing to keep on getting better. And, if you’ve done the work of building an inclusive team, you won’t do this work alone. Instead, you’ll share the work with your community, giving everyone the chance to share their feedback.

To keep the dialogue ongoing and open, give your community options to leave feedback on their experiences. This can range from quarterly surveys to giving contributors the freedom to create channels in your project’s communication platforms to chat about mental health, being a person of color, how to handle negotiations, etc. Such channels give contributors ways to connect socially, which is crucial for increasing asynchronous collaboration. It also gives you new ways to support contributors so they can contribute more fully.

"I am hearing-impaired, and I requested that the All Things Open conference consider [hearing impairment] when in larger venues where keynotes were speaking and there were no specific adaptations [in the venue] for those of us who were not able to hear," explains Don Watkins (He/Him), a community correspondent for OpenSource.com who has been active in the Linux community for two decades. "Specific adaptations were added [by All Things Open] for those us were not able to hear."

"I was particularly impressed when attending the Creative Commons Global Summit in Toronto in 2018, where nearly all presentations were accompanied by folks who signed and also provided simultaneous closed captioning of all speakers."

Inclusion isn’t a one-time pull request: It’s an ongoing, important activity. Without building and sustaining inclusive communities, there’s no hope of improving diversity of open source contributors. To recruit new talent, prevent maintainer burnout, and create affirming online environments, open source maintainers should commit to inclusion. Change starts from within, and when technology contributors from a variety of backgrounds see your inclusive efforts, they will be much more likely to join.

"Make it easy for people to get involved and to contribute back," says Ruff. "The mark of a good project is not how complex it is, but how easy it is to get involved."

[2] For a sample style guide, see PEP 8 — Style Guide for Python Code or the style guide for contributing to Mozilla Firefox, a project that employs multiple programming languages in its development.

[3] https://www.drupal.org/about accessed June 22, 2020 05:43 CET

[4] Kubernetes home page, https://kubernetes.io/, accessed June 22, 2020 05:57 CET

[5] The authors are grateful for the work of Kent C.Dodds and Sara Drasner in their article An Open Source Etiquette Guidebook, accessed 24 June 2020 12:52 CET.

[6] Gaia Vince, Evolution explains why we act differently online

[7] _https://producingoss.com/en/producingoss-letter.pdf, page 64, accessed 24 June 2020 11:46 CET

[8] https://www.dreamwidth.org/legal/diversity accessed 2 July 2020 13:37 CET (and how leet it is :)

Guiding Participants

"Participation" in an open source project is an interesting—and somewhat amorphous—concept to describe. The line separating "I’m just a user! Don’t talk to me about anything more" and "How can I help contribute to this project?" seem clear enough. Yet active participation in a project begins the moment someone cares enough about the software to do more than simply consume it. And because open source software is by nature inclusive and participatory, most users become participants rather quickly and easily—often by simply leaving a comment on the project’s blog, filing an issue in the project’s tracker, or engaging with the project on social media. By using open source software, they’ve already begun participating in the process of making the software better.

Here are some examples of various types of participation:

- Talking to a friend about how much you like the software or the goals of the open source project.

- Engaging in a hallway or booth-side discussion about the software at a conference or event.

- Asking, upvoting, and answering questions about the software on various forums.

- Putting a sticker on your laptop to advertize your support of the software.

- Giving constructive feedback to a contributor about the software or project.

- Recommending and offering to help others adopt and use the software.

This section contains chapters that:

- Discuss the ideas and forces behind the motivation to participate.

- Present details on how active participants benefit the project.

This section is useful for you if:

- You are looking to understand the differences among communities made up of less engaged users, enthusiastic participants, and active contributors.

- You want to understand what attracts people to participate in a pathway toward contribution.

- You are looking to give your participation community a better experience.

- You wish to build bridges to enable participants to become contributors.

- You want to explore the benefit of user feedback in open source software.

- You have reached the middle of this guidebook by starting at the beginning, and are working your way toward the end.

Why Do People Participate in Open Source Communities?

Introduction

Why do people participate in open source communities? What do they get out of it? Are they focused on their own needs, or are they mostly thinking about others?

Given that people are involved, the answer—as you might guess—is complicated and varied.

One need only consider the behaviors we see in open source communities to very quickly intuit that there’s no single force at work here. After all, we see plenty of contributors on most big open source projects who are doing so at part of their day job. That doesn’t mean they don’t care about open source beyond a paycheck. But it does suggest different reasons for participation than the contributor working nights and weekends on their own passion project. Furthermore, we see contributors who are focused on solving some interesting technical problems while others are explicitly trying to bring about a societal benefit.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t figure out some common patterns. Not only has there been academic research into open source contributions specifically, but there’s a whole body of psychology literature dealing with motivation. As a result, motivation is the lens we’ll use in this chapter to examine the question of why contributors participate in open source.

Extrinsic motivation

We could say that this type of motivator is about "Show me the money!" and leave it at that. Extrinsic motivation isn’t quite that simple, but payment—in whatever form common during a given era and place—has historically been the go-to way to get people to do something. Whether to accumulate riches or provide themselves with basic necessities such as food and shelter. The idea that you do work you otherwise wouldn’t bother with in exchange for something of value is deep-rooted in most human societies.

However obvious the existence of extrinsic motivation may seem to the average person, it wasn’t really a field of formal study until the 1940s when behaviorist Clark Hull, later working with Kenneth Spence, came up with the idea of drive reduction theory. This theory focused on reducing primary drives like hunger and thirst. If you’re hungry you eat. If you’re thirsty you drink. Drive reduction theory fell out of fashion, in part because it didn’t focus on things—like money—that could be used to reduce drives but only in a secondary way. However, we see echoes of drive reduction theory in familiar concepts like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Coming back to what makes contributors work on open source, money can, of course, be a big incentive. Even going back twenty years or so, many major open source projects had a significant number of contributors who were paid by their companies to work on open source.

Career advancement goes hand in hand with pay. But is open source software any different from proprietary software development in this regard? It may be. Multiple researchers have found empirical evidence to support the idea there’s at least a perceived advantage that supports the argument there are career advantages to developing code that’s in the open and therefore available for others to look at and work with.

More recently, there’s been significant empirical evidence to support the argument there are perceived career advantages to developing code and contributing content that’s in the open, and therefore available for others to look at and work with. Indeed, the idea of "GitHub-as-resume" has become a common (if sometimes inappropriately applied) theme.

Intrinsic motivation

Research beginning in the 1970s started to focus on intrinsic motivations, which do not require an apparent reward other than the activity itself. Self-Determination Theory, developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, would later evolve from studies comparing intrinsic and extrinsic motives, and from a growing understanding of the dominant role intrinsic motivations can play in behavior.

With respect to open source software, it’s perhaps the ideological or altruistic motivations that first come to mind here. After all, in the case of free software at least, there was always an ideological and political element from the beginning even if there were also practical benefits for a user to have access to source code.

There’s some evidence from surveys that contributors can be somewhat motivated by these factors. However, the research results are mixed. Some contributors say on surveys that they’re participating, in part, for ideological or altruistic reasons. But the effect is most pronounced among contributors doing open source as a hobby. And while altruism certainly can influence professional contributors, this mostly seems to be the case among contributors who are also satisfied with their pay and other aspects of their career.

A variant of altruism is kinship amity. It’s related to the concept of gift economies but is specific to family (kin) groups which don’t expect a calculated quid pro quo. (In other words, family members do things for each other but they don’t typically keep a running tally, at least a systematic one, of who hasn’t been pulling their weight recently.) It’s different from altruism in that it is restricted to the group to which one belongs, such as an open source community. Here again the research is mixed. Studies have generally found a positive relationship between identified kinship amity and various measurements of effort, such as number of hours worked per week—but the correlation is often fairly weak.

Finally, there’s just fun. This should come as no surprise to anyone who hangs around open source developers, designers, and content creators. Most of them like working on open source projects. One large study from 2007 (Luthiger and Jungwirth) determined that fun accounted for 28 percent of the effort (hours) dedicated to projects. Though, again, it’s easier to feel motivated by fun and altruism when it’s either a hobby or you’re otherwise satisfied professionally.

Internalized extrinsic motivation

Today’s psychology literature also includes the idea of internalized extrinsic motivations. These are extrinsic motivations such as gaining skills to enhance career opportunities—but they’ve been internalized so that the motivation comes from within rather than coming as a direct result of a carrot (reward) being dangled by someone else. It’s the difference between learning a new language because you know keeping current on new tech pays off over time versus receiving a salary increase as a direct payoff for earning a certification. Gaining a good peer reputation, among community insiders and potential employers, for work in open source is one good example of how this type of motivation can play out in open source development. A variety of surveys have supported the idea that peer reputation is a driver for participation.

Learning is also frequently mentioned as a big benefit to participating in open source projects. Learning may be intrinsically satisfying but it can also be an important ingredient of career advancement. It can be hard to tease apart the intrinsic from the extrinsic here though. Is it learning for learning’s sake? Is it learning for specific skills needed on the job?

A final motivator in this category is what researchers call "own-use value" but is more recognizably described as something like "scratch your own itch." Develop something that you want for yourself and create something for others in the process. That something is ultimately an external reward to yourself but no one is forcing you to do it.

Conclusion

As noted earlier, motivations for many things are multi-faceted and contributing to open source software is no exception. However, here are three takeaways that you may find useful.

Don’t expect non-extrinsic motivators to carry too much of the load. Many do contribute to open source projects for idealistic or altruistic reasons. But those are usually not the sole motivators and may not even be important ones. Especially in the case of projects that have commercial backing, pay, and other professional working benefits matter a great deal.

Ampily non-extrinsic motivators such as learning and peer recognition. While not replacements for more direct benefits, the opportunity to be recognized by peers and to work in new technology areas are motivators. Organizations should consider peer recognition programs and explicitly encourage learning in order to make the best use of these motivational factors.

Motivators can be counter-productive when over-rotated. Precisely because motivations are multi-faceted, don’t place too big a bet on any single one. We already discussed the limitations of ideology and altruism. However, also consider something like "scratch your own itch" for example. If that’s the only reason someone contributes, they’ll tend to wander in and out of a project as their own specific needs merit. That may be a perfectly fine outcome, but it’s not a path to developing a long-term maintainer.

Growing Contributors

This is the longest and most thorough section of the guidebook because the challenges of creating a community around an open source software project are complex, interesting, difficult, sticky, and rewarding.

Once you reach the point where someone wants to help you make your software better, there is a sacred, ages-old responsibility you have as a human already inside of a community, responding to and enabling someone outside of that community to come in from the cold. This is made even more poignant when that person has come to bring not only their precious attention but an associated willingness towards effort. Effort to make the world a better place.

Because at its core, when someone willingingly contributes to a community effort, it is from the desire we all share to see the world a better place. Contribution is the moment where desire becomes action.

This section contains chapters that:

- Explain the journey and shifts from participating to contributing.

- Define and provide examples of what are contributions to an open source project.

- Provide steps towards organizing a full open source project.

- Give material for efforts and creating a program to welcome new contributors onboard the project.

- Share the importance of having a culture of mentorship.

- Have concrete steps towards building a mentoring program.

- Cover the means and methods for creating and conducting governance.

- List types of community roles and the meanings around them.

- Focus on the importance of and techniques for self-care for community managers and contributors.

This section is useful for you if:

- You are looking to grow a contributor base.

- You want a deeper, more thorough understanding of one of the key topics in this section.

- You are troubleshooting issues around your contributors or work they are doing.

- You need some reference materials to explain to the methods and philosophy of guiding a contributor community.

- You’ve been waiting all guidebook to get to this section, not wanting to skip ahead, but savoring each page.

From Users to Contributors

Introduction

Every open source project begins with code and one or more developers. What turns that project into a community are the people who engage with one another around that code. No matter the maturity level of your project, one of the most important things you can do to ensure its success is encourage and maintain engagement with its users and contributors.

When a user of your project makes the effort to engage with the developers of the project, treat the contribution as you would a gift from someone close to you. This person has taken time they could have spent on something else and chosen to use that time to engage with the project. Perhaps they’ve submitted bug reports, offered feature requests, or made pull requests; whatever the contribution, the initial interactions they create are critical for determining whether that person will develop a positive or negative impression of your project and its community.

Here are a few steps you can take to create a welcoming culture that treats user engagement as the gift it is.

Accept the gift

Reacting positively to user engagement might be difficult if, for example, a user is upset because something in your project doesn’t work as they’d expect. At times like this, remember that this person is making an effort to tell you about their issue. Think of it like the time your well-meaning aunt got you the cheap knock-off building blocks instead of the Lego set you were hoping for; when someone engages with your project for the first time, you have a single opportunity to make a good first impression.

First, thank the person for their contribution and acknowledge it. Many times, when people turn up to your project upset, the very first thing they want is reassurance that they aren’t the source of the trouble–reassurance that, yes, this is harder to use than it should be. Helping them over the particular speed bump they’re hitting will turn them from critics to cheerleaders for the project.

Provide actionable, useful feedback

Feedback for new contributors is only useful to the extent that it’s actionable—that is, that the contributor can do something as a result of what you’ve offered.

In the case that someone is asking a question, you may need more information from them in order to answer it. For instance, if you’re reviewing a pull request containing materials that don’t not match the project’s coding conventions, you’ll want the contributor to make some changes to their contribution. In the event that you’re giving feedback or asking for something from them, it’s important to look at your project with a beginner’s eye. There’s nothing more frustrating than having a question answered with something completely esoteric—"Just frobding the dollygagger!"—and scratching your head, saying "How on Earth do I do that?"

When reviewing code, do not assume a high level of proficiency with the programming language, your project, or even with how to update a pull request in GitHub. If your project runs on Kubernetes, do not assume that the person you are dealing with is an admin on the Kubernetes cluster, or is familiar with Kubernetes internals.

If in doubt, you can always ask some level-setting questions. But if you’re telling someone to change an option in a config file, be sure to provide instructions on where to find the file and explain the file’s format.

Give engaged users a good experience

When someone engages with your project, do everything in your power to ensure they come away from the interaction feeling good. This is important—not just for the person you are dealing with, but for all of the people you’ll never hear from who are looking on. The latter person might be a reader who finds a StackOverflow question six months later, or a bystander in a community chat forum. When these users observe others having a good experience, they’ll feel better about the project too.

People over process

Large development teams rely on process for efficient operation. Whether they use bug tracker workflow management to validate whether and when changes can be merged, or perform smoke tests that run on every pull request, they build layers of tooling to help developers work through a large number of changes without going mad.

For someone active in the project, this kind of infrastructure provides huge value! But for a newcomer to your project, it’s all very mysterious.

As a community-focused software developer, you’ll need to be mindful of newcomers to your project. If their first PR does not pass smoke tests, it is worth taking an extra minute to explain what the tests are and why they are important, rather than just commenting "CI fail" or "whitespace issues" without any context.

In short, value the person making the contribution more highly than the contribution itself.

Build relationships

Finally, when a new contributor shows up to your project, remember that you’re facing an opportunity to engage with someone who is using your project, to find out more about how they found it, what they like and dislike about it, and more. That information is golden; direct access to users is one of the advantages open source software development has over proprietary software development. Take advantage of it!

These conversations will have another by-product: For a user who may have been considering your software as the product of a faceless corporation, you are putting a name and face to the project. In short, you are building a relationship.

Think about the first time you turn up in a new school, neighborhood, or company. What makes you feel like you belong is that human connection with someone who, just a few minutes before, was a stranger. This relationship, as small and nascent as it is, is what will bring this person back to your project and turn them from a consumer into a community participant.

Helping developers engage with community projects

One of the most common issues seen with experienced professional software developers who start to work on community software is a reluctance to engage with public communication channels, like mailing lists. Understanding the reasons why, and helping your developers engage with the community, is a key to creating a successful and fruitful relationship with the community you are working with.

Common reasons for this reluctance include a lack of confidence in written English skills, a perceived lack of technical skills, nervousness related to public peer review, and perceiving community interaction as "communication" or "marketing," which they believe is not part of their job.

Lack of confidence

Traditionally, university engineering courses do not put a strong focus on clear written communications. This can lead to professional software developers who have not developed their writing skills. In open source projects, written communication is critical to working asynchronously with a community team: blogging to promote work, documenting feature proposals, or debating the pros and cons of roadmap items on a mailing list.

In addition, while most engineers appreciate good logic, rhetoric and debate are not typically part of an engineering syllabus. The end result is that when asked to write about their work, or to ask a question on a public forum, they hesitate.

For non-English speakers, lack of confidence in English proficiency can also be an issue that gets in the way of mailing list participation.

I remember one engineer I worked with, who was very hesitant to write email about topics we discussed, even when we agreed that they needed to be discussed with the community. When he did, he appeared to ignore responses or questions from community members. When this was discussed with him, it was clear that he did not feel comfortable engaging in a discussion in writing on a publicly archived mailing list. He was nervous that any mis-steps or breaches of etiquette would be dealt with harshly by the community.

The best way to cure this problem is with baby steps.

A great first step is to get engineers answering questions. One way to help is to publicly refer a question to an engineer on the mailing list, while affirming their expertise in the area. "Tammy knows the RLE algorithms inside out. Tammy, would you mind answering Franz’s question, please?"

This is something of a Jedi mind trick, and serves three purposes. First, an individual can easily ignore a question if it is addressed to a group, but it is a rare person who doesn’t answer when you ask them a question directly–it’s human nature.

Second, affirming your engineer’s skills reinforces that they are indeed seen as the expert in the area in question, giving them more confidence to answer. Third, by identifying an individual engineer with a specific skill set, you are giving people outside your company a glimpse inside the walls. You are making your team human, a collection of individuals with different strengths and weaknesses, rather than an amorphous group—"the Acme Co developers."

Another worthwhile thing to do is to get developers into the habit of writing regularly. It is not enough to stand over people and ask them all to have a blog. If writing is intimidating, then doing it more often will make it less so. There are many ways to do this–rewarding blog posts, requiring regular status reports, longer commit messages or comments when closing tickets, or scheduling time for creative writing workshops. The goal is not to turn developers into novelists. The goal is to get your team in the habit of writing.

Finally, you should train your engineers in basic netiquette and writing good emails. Developers should treat writing email in a similar way to patches. When you generate a patch, typically the last thing you do before you send it is you check over it, to make sure nothing silly is included. The same habit applied to email would identify any places where phrasing is awkward and ambiguous, resulting in better email.

The peer review gauntlet

While writing can be intimidating for many software engineers, subjecting their work to peer review to a group of people they do not know very well can be nerve-wracking.

In my experience, systematic peer review is not the norm in the software industry. Some managers see peer review as overhead. After all, the developer was hired because they were competent to do the job, and nobody likes to be second-guessed by "the community." Once engineers reach a certain level of experience, peer review seems to be more an exception than the rule for professional software developers in our industry.

In community projects, peer review is expected. In fact, it is a best practice, one of the things that separates successful community projects from the crowd. Community developers expect to hear about features before they are developed, and have an opportunity to suggest better ways the feature can be implemented. They expect new contributors to submit patches that they can review–it is the way a new contributor builds trust before gaining committer or maintainer status.

The best way to get people used to peer review inside professional software teams is to have a company policy against the "day one commit bit"—the practice of getting commit access to an open source project repository on the day you start in the company. For corporate-sponsored projects, new developers should go through the same review process for their work that contributors outside your company have to go through.

For corporate contributions to community projects, that means discouraging internal branches and a "gatekeeper" project structure, where one or two developers commit the work of others in the team.

Developers should submit their work upstream at the same time it is being submitted internally. For those changes which only apply to your internal branches, peer review should still occur in a private repository. With the recent advent of git-based repositories as a norm for software development, this is less of a challenge for companies now than it once was, and it is necessary to transition your team to successful community contributors.

Having new developers go through this review period is important for a number of reasons–the most important is that you are demonstrating that employees have the same burden to prove themselves in the project as non-employee contributors, and it provides new employees with a period where they familiarise themselves with project coding and communication conventions and norms, and when they also introduce themselves to the community at large. This is fundamental to the mentorship of new developers by more experienced community developers.

Communication and marketing are not my job

In the mind of some developers, posting project plans to the mailing list constitutes an announcement and needs substantial preparation. These developers frame communicating with community users on a mailing list as being equivalent to "support" or "communication," and not as a core part of the engineering function.

If a developer frames "sending an email to a mailing list" as "making an announcement," it fits in the "marketing" box in their head. A developer once told me she didn’t have time to send email to the mailing list, because she had real work to do. "Dealing with the community" was my job as community manager, as far as she was concerned. In her mind, community messaging was a type of support, and was not part of her job.

The authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto claimed that in the modern connected world, there is no such thing as a marketing department, that every interaction between an employee of your company and someone outside your company is an opportunity to win or lose reputation.

In free software development teams, this is even more true. There is no marketing department for project communications. To be productive, you need to talk to your peers, so the institutional barrier to external communications must disappear for people dealing in community projects.

Even in organizations that are clear about their expectations for open source communication, engineers may impose limits on themselves. They might spend hours polishing proposals before sending them on. This is counter-productive in community projects, since the more polished an initial proposal is, the more emotional investment has been made in it. Polished proposals are harder to review and change, too, since they look done already. It is better to release a rough early draft, giving the author an opportunity to integrate early feedback.

The best way to prove to your team the benefits of "release early, release often" is by example. As a team lead or manager, you can lead by publishing team plans publicly and early, and iterating often. When you do, point out the benefits which result to your team. Breaking down this barrier will take time, but by making it clear that perfection is not expected, and by rewarding early release of information and encouraging feedback, your team will soon learn that participants outside your company are peers, not an audience.

Another useful technique is to ask your engineers to break tasks into smaller parts, so that even if they do hold off until the first part is up to a high standard, information is still getting out there more quickly, allowing feedback to inform later stages of the process.

Working against the goal of early communication is the common desire for the big reveal. Companies often want to align product releases and announcements with major trade shows. This can lead companies to ask their engineers to work internally on significant features for fear that the big surprise will be ruined otherwise. The alternative seems to be to announce a project when you start, rather than when you have something to show–but this can result in a long wait before products get to market, and impatience and bad press from the mainstream press.

It is possible to separate engineers discussing design decisions and implementation details of significant features in a mailing list, and using a press release and marketing campaign to promote an announcement. When the final announcement comes out, the community will not be completely surprised, and you will not find yourself having to defend yourself for working in secret for months, and proposing a big code drop which is difficult to review.

Building relationships

The key lesson here is that you want your developers to feel a connection to people working outside the company. That requires people outside your company to feel a connection with them, too. By drawing the curtain back on your team, its members and their skills and priorities, you are creating the circumstances for the people working on your project to come to appreciate each other as peers, and to feel comfortable discussing features and patches on their merits.

When you get to that point, you have won the battle. Developers in your team will see other developers working on the project as peers, colleagues, and even friends.

What Is a Contribution?

There is a common misunderstanding that only code and possibly documentation are a "true" contribution to an open source project. This terrible idea has a name that deserves to stay a part of history, "code is king." Let’s have no more of that.

In truth, there are exponentially more ways to contribute than just those two ways. And exponentially more value for the project and the diverse group of contributors making those contributions.

An open source Contribution

Any original, intentional, and substantive object given freely to an open source community, under the licensing of that community. A contribution can come from an individual or a community.

An open source Contributor

Any individual person involved in making Contributions to the community. Communities are interpersonal by their nature. They consist of humans, not organizations. Organizations can send their members, staff, leaders, and so forth out to make contributions to a community as a contributor

Examples of specific contributions (objects):

- An idea.

- A design suggestion.

- Creating or improving a process.

- Performing any sustained effort.

- A piece of content, such as a document, release announcement, interview, how-to article, operations page, and so forth.

- Code, a type of content that instructs machines to do things, regardless of the type of code.

- Physical materials, such as servers or contributor gifts.

- Monetary, where possible and welcome. (This is not always an easy or even possible way to contribute to many open source projects.)

- Being a moderator on a forum.

- Helping at an event

- Being the manager for a release.

- A website design.

- An automation script.

- A test suite.

- Testing and bug reporting.

- Build a relationship with between two projects.

- Write a marketing plan.

- Creating a roadmap.

- Performing project management (PM) skills for an effort in the community.

- Doing quantitative or qualitative analysis.

- Creating a logo.

- Establishing a project’s Code of Conduct.

- Helping the project with legal considerations.

- Building a contributor/maintainer/leader recruiting process.

- And so forth.

Practically any skill you might learn in a job role, from customer service to product management, can underly a contribution. Any need you can imagine another community having, might be a need of an open source community and can form the basis of a contribution.

It is useful to be mindful of the breadth and depth of types of contributions. As part of the practice of community management, you will have to be aware of the many ways people contribute to a project. Then you can thank them for their contribution, connecting their action from the individual back to the whole and the greater effort.

Essentials of Building a Community

Free and open-source projects are among the most successful ones, and can be uniquely fulfilling for participants. Because these projects rely on healthy communities to get things done, they must consciously carry out community building, including the following practices:

- Building leadership and preparing for leadership changes.

- Recruiting, training, and mentoring members, including diverse roles and demographic groups.

- Decision-making and conflict resolution.

- Upholding positive norms.

- Recognition and rewards.

- Running effective meetings.

Open source helps to remind technologists that community is critical to producing good technology and getting it accepted. This is often forgotten by companies and technologists working in isolation, but if you choose to make technology free and open source, you take a big step toward lining up the people you need to ensure that a product meets a need, has features users want, and is easy to use.

This document summarizes the tasks that project leaders and members should carry out for a successful community, and lists some best practices for carrying out the tasks. We recommend that every project have a community steering committee, which is parallel to the technical steering committee.

Leaders of a community should establish best practices at the start. Trying to catch problems and define norms in a rearguard action is confusing for participants and may drive many away. But while best practices should be made clear, they may also evolve as the community develops.

Challenges of open source projects

The following aspects of communities must be taken into account when defining best practices for open source:

- Many people joining are novices. Some need training in the technology being developed, some in tools, and most in how to interact effectively in the group.

- People like to be recognized for their contributions, especially if they are volunteers.

- Non-technical contributions in advocacy and community-building are often unnoticed or undervalued.

- Diversity in gender, race, and ability make a big difference in how useful the product is to broad groups of users, but this diversity is hard to achieve.

Building leadership

There are many leadership roles. Many technical projects focus on technical leadership, which people usually take on after making technical contributions. Other types of leadership include:

- Recruiting project members

- Mentoring project members

- Conflict resolution

- Handling legal and financial issues

The community steering committee can ensure that these activities are done well. In addition, a marketing steering committee can handle the important tasks of public relations, advocacy, and events.

Recruiting project members

An effective community requires more than simply opening the door and waiting for people to join. Leaders must look at the skills and knowledge the project needs, and research who can provide these.

To make sure a useful product results from your efforts, representatives of any groups who are potentially affected by the project should be invited to join the project. The affected groups who need representation include potential users, other technical projects that are affected, and people who are under-represented (see the section on Diversity). Leaders of each project must take explicit action to determine who stakeholders are and to engage representatives of those stakeholders.

The principle behind such engagement is that users, and other groups who may be affected indirectly by a project, have needs that are often hidden from outsiders. Bringing in representatives of all affected groups helps the project produce a more useful product that all can enjoy, and that is fair to all. There is a practical motivation for early engagement too: you avoid the risk that someone will denounce your project at a late stage and prevent its adoption.

Orientation for steering committee members

Onboarding a steering committee member should include:

- Motivating the steering committee member by explaining the benefits of serving.

- Explaining the meeting times and other time commitments. This should be done within a positive framework, which is provided by the motivation mentioned earlier.

- Offering some history of the project, which is often not known to new steering committee members.

- Ensuring that conflicts of interest or other problems will not prevent them from serving.

- Reminding the member of the project’s legal and fiduciary responsibilities.

- Explaining current project needs and any important debates over project direction.

Decision-making and conflict resolution

Open source projects move along best through consensus, but this can’t always be achieved. The simple solution adopted by many early open source projects, where the final decision is made by a single project leader (usually the founder of the project, and sometimes called a benevolent dictator) doesn’t work well over time. That is why the project should form technical and community steering committees to take responsibility.

Voting can be useful to gauge the mood of the community, but is not definitive the way it is in a parliamentary vote. This is because those who join the project and who vote are self-selected. Therefore, the vote may be biased.

See the section "Enforcing norms" for conflicts involving possible violations of the code of conduct.

Member development

Leaders should be on the look-out for ways to get members to take on larger volunteer roles. They should put particular effort into people who identify as members of groups that lack representation (as discussed in the section "Diversity"). When a member shows interest or initiative, the leader should encourage it through a conversation. Possible invitations to do more are:

- "I see that you took a strong interest in the proposed shutdown feature. Would you join the team working on it? We expect it to require an hourly weekly meeting for four weeks, plus some time for development."

- "You mentioned when you joined our group that you had deployed our product at your company. Could you meet with our marketing team for half an hour to explain how you presented the product and won approval?"

Note that each "ask" includes an estimate of the time involved. But sometimes, the invitation shouldn’t mention a time commitment because it might be big enough to scare away the member. Better to hook them on the important of the task they’re being asked to perform. Then their excitement—and hopefully a positive experience working with others—will carry them along.

As with recruitment and other aspects of managing members, development must be done with special and conscious attention to encouraging women and members of other historically excluded groups to flex their muscles in new responsibilities. Never assume that a certain type of person is suited (or not suited) to a particular task.

Recognition and rewards

Volunteers come to a project for many reasons. Experts want to create standards around their practices, students come to hone their skills, and everyone wants to make better technology for the world. But at all levels, people appreciate being rewarded for their work and will contribute more if they feel rewarded.

A badging system gives contributors a clear goal to aim for, and marks people who might be able to contribute at higher levels and move into leadership. See [Badges for individuals and projects]() for more about this concept.

Metrics are crucial to determining the contributors to reward. And these must be meaningful metrics that reflect real achievements; otherwise they can offer perverse incentives to do things like make worthless commits. See the section "Who has contributed".

Preparing new leadership

Getting volunteers to rise into leadership roles is hard. Most joined the project to contribute their technical skills, or other roles as an individual contributor. They tend to be afraid of the time commitment of taking on a leadership role, or see the tasks as boring distractions from what they really love to do.

On top of this, leaders are busy dealing with the needs of the project and have trouble finding time to recruit and mentor new leaders. Yet these tasks are critical to long-term projects.

Recruiting leaders is an aspect of member development. Look for members who are asking deep questions, proposing new directions for the project or new ways of marketing it, or other informal aspects of leadership. You can engage them in two ways: you can describe an open leadership role and ask directly whether they would be willing to step into it, or start a dialog where you find out what they want from the project and then encourage them to take on leadership in order to achieve these goals.

Serving in a leadership position is both a time commitment and a serious responsibility, but it’s a wonderful chance for growth that everyone should do. Here are some possible incentives you can offer people whom you invite to join your leadership:

- They have a far vaster scope for implementing the changes they want in the project

- They can see deeper into the purpose and impact of the project

- They interact intimately with project leaders, whom they presumably respect and even would like to emulate

- They learn new skills for project management and dealing with communities

- Their expertise and contributions are recognized by the community and by outsiders, providing more networking opportunities and personal career growth

Don’t stress the time required for the role. Often, the first question a volunteer asks is, "How much time must I spend?" Try to get them to think of the benefits to the project if they become leaders, of the enhanced position they’ll have, and the benefits it will bring them. Don’t be afraid to flatter members by explaining how important they are—it’s all true!

Diversity

The leaders and team members of most technical projects lack diversity in race and nationality, in gender (a category that covers men, women, and people who identify as LGBTQ+), and in ability (for instance, blindness, dexterity, or ability to process abstract information). Even if the dominant group tries to be sensitive to the needs of other demographics, they probably don’t understand the physical and cultural situations of other demographics enough to represent their needs adequately. Results of the project may turn out implicitly discriminatory unless members of excluded communities are brought into the design.

Although a code of conduct is critical to welcoming diverse groups, it is not enough because it addresses only negative behavior. Leaders should actively seek out representatives of excluded groups. Some steps include:

- Inviting potentially affected members of under-represented groups onto leadership. People identified as "minorities" tend to get many such requests, and often feel frustrated because their recommendations haven’t been followed in other projects. So the person inviting them has to be able to explain the impact of the project and show evidence that their recommendations will be taken seriously.

- Asking project members to identify members of the excluded groups and invite them to the project, or connect them with project leaders.

Although a diversity committee may help to promote the importance of diversity on a project, diversity is the responsibility of every project member and should be considered in every project decision.

The tone of the community

Abuse of community norms should be addressed right away. Ideally, if someone violates norms for good behavior, other members will politely mention that and the violator will change his or her behavior. But in case no one speaks up, or the violator starts a flame war over the behavior (which could exhaust the group and cause even more damage than the original offense), a moderator is needed. And this moderator must have the authority to enforce the norms, even by banning someone if necessary. (That should be very rare.)

It’s tempting to divide this moderator role among many people, but there are dangers to doing so. They may react differently to an ambiguous violation of the code of conduct, and might even get into a flame war of their own, which is extremely destructive. It’s better to have one moderator at a time (alternating moderators if the job is big), but have the community steering committee review decisions without burdening the membership with the debate.

When the code of conduct is violated in a way that threatens the participation of a community member, or that threatens to degrade the level of discussion, the top priority of the community—and a moderator monitoring the discussion—is to uphold norms and make sure the threat is removed. This usually requires an unambiguous criticism of the offensive statement. However, there are different ways to do this, and an approach that is empathetic to all sides may produce happier outcomes.

Remember that volunteers almost invariably join a project with good intentions, and that many have excellent skills to offer. Offensive statements usually emerge either from strong feelings or from ignorance. While stating that the offensive statement cannot be tolerated, a moderator or mentor can talk directly to the person who made the statement to figure out what triggered it. Usually, the person can be kept in the community and guided toward a better form of interaction.

To repair the damage of the offensive statement, leaders—and hopefully other community members—must declare it out of bounds. But the person who made the statement should—after a personal discussion with a leader—apologize and promise to avoid future behavior of that sort. If such an apology is not forthcoming, the person who made the statement may have to be banned at least temporarily.

A statement that violates the code of conduct should therefore be handled in two stages. First, a leader or moderator must declare that the statement violates the code of conduct and is not permitted. Then a leader should privately contact the person who made the statement and elicit why it was made. Was the person in the heat of a strong opinion? Did they deliberately want to provoke or discourage other members of the group? Did they honestly not realize that the statement was offensive? After determining the reason for the statement, the leader should engage with the person who made it and help them learn how to be in the community productively. The person may have to be banned, though, if they refuse intervention or insist on their "right" to violate the code of conduct.

A popular and useful summary of a good community atmosphere is [The Apache Way](https://www.apache.org/theapacheway/), developed by the Apache Software Foundation, which is one of the leading organizations in free and open source software.

Measuring progress

Measurements play several valuable roles, including:

- Revealing who has contributed, and thus contributing to members' morale and their desire to contribute.

- Gauging the effectiveness of the project (e.g., new product features, the rate of addressing bug reports).

- Gauging the health of the project and identifying aspects that need work.

Luckily, modern tools make it easy to collect many measurements through automated tools.

Who has contributed

Healthy projects highlight people’s contributions, because most of them are not being paid to do and have no personal benefit except recognition of their effort. Furthermore, when you know who has contributed the most, you can help people rise in responsibility in a kind of meritocracy.

Luckily, software and other text-based projects provide tools that automatically measure certain types of contributions. Use source control, the bug tracker, and other tools to track a few metrics you think are key. Lines of code are not a good measure of productivity. But numbers of bugs fixed and numbers of changes accepted could be useful.

Effectiveness of the project

Is the project actually contributing to its field? Numbers of downloads are one crude but useful measure. Many people download a product to try it out and then discard it, so use other measures if possible to gauge the real growth of the user base: for instance, look at the number of people participating on forums and the number of questions asked.

Health of the project

This helps you know whether the project is making progress. It’s also important to have the right mix of project members: some who have been on the project for a long time and can provide institutional memory, along with more recent recruits who provide new blood. The forums should record when people joined and left, so you can develop metrics from that information.

Another important set of metrics concern how many bugs get fixed, and how quickly. It’s not bad for a project to have a lot of bug reports. Every project has bugs, so a steady stream of bug reports shows that people are using the product. But the bugs should get fixed!

Recommended reading

Some resources we drew on to write these summary guidelines include:

- Overview article: [How To Build An Open Source Community](http://oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/howtobuildcommunity)

- "[Producing Open Source Software](https://producingoss.com/) is a book about the human side of open source development. It describes how successful projects operate, the expectations of users and developers, and the culture of free software." (From the web site.)

- "Online communities provide a wide range of opportunities for supporting a cause, marketing a product or service, or building open source software. [The Art of Community](https://www.jonobacon.com/2009/09/18/the-art-of-community-available-for-free-download/) helps you recruit members, motivate them, and manage them as active participants. Discover how your community can become a reliable support network, a valuable source of new ideas, and a powerful marketing force. The expanded second edition shows you how to keep community projects on track, make use of social media, and organize collaborative events." (From the web site.)

- [The Wisdom of Crowds](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/175380/the-wisdom-of-crowds-by-james-surowiecki/): A fresh look at how to gather ideas from diverse groups of people, by journalist James Surowiecki. From the website: "James Surowiecki explores a deceptively simple idea: Large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant—better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future."

Onboarding

Introduction

Contributors are the lifeblood of any open source project. A project not continually welcoming new participants might find itself stagnating—or, worse, falling apart.

So any open source project desiring long-term sustainability should think seriously about the ways it connects with, greets, and acclimates—in a word, how it "onboards"—new contributors. A well-designed onboarding process makes contributing to your project easier for participants, and it empowers contributors to positively impact the the work as quickly as possible.

In this chapter, we’ll discuss the importance of your community’s onboarding experience and examine some common onboarding resources and practices that may help your project become more sustainable.

The importance of an onboarding experience

In many ways, the experience of onboarding in a new open source community is much like one you might have in a new job.

For example, when you begin working in a new position (or in an entirely new organization), you’ll need to become familiar with new people, new tools, new processes, new norms, new policies, and more. And you’ll likely feel motivated to do these things quickly, because you’re eager to demonstrate your value to the organization and become comfortable in your new environment so you can do your best work. The faster you feel like you’re making an impact, the more likely you are to stick around. And the more satisfied you’ll be.

But you may also be joining a team with an extensive history—shared norms and customs, in-jokes, jargon, unspoken agreements, shared bonds, and a sense of collective identity. In short, your new team or organization will have a culture that pre-exists and pre-dates your joining it. Facets of this culture are largely intangible, but they’ll significantly affect your ability to collaborate with others. An effective onboarding experience equips you to understand this culture.

All of this remains true of onboarding experiences in open source communities. In particular, open source communities present onboarding challenges like:

An asynchronous and remote environment

One of the great perks of a traditional office environment is that you are close to your co-workers and managers for face to face interactions and you can find them for quick questions. In contrast, when you join a new open source community, you will likely work with community members in different georgraphies and time zones. So unless there are good onboarding materials such as documentation, video tutorials, wiki pages, and other resources, it’s going to be more challenging to get started in open source communties even for experienced self starters.

Imposter syndrome

When it’s more difficult to get real time help or feedback, people can easily get stuck with simple tools issues and feel less confident about their work. So a good onboarding experience in open source communities is crucial for newcomers not to feel discouraged in their early days in the community.

Significant variability

No two open source communities are the same. Even for seasoned open source contributors, when they join a new community they will need to get familiar with new tools, new processes, and even new terminologies. Depending on the community, seemingly simple terms like contributions, community members, projects, upstream, etc. may mean something slightly different and can easily cause confusion for new community members.

Onboarding basics

As you work to make your project’s onboarding process and experience most effective, ask yourself these questions:

- What can people contribute to the project?

- Where do people contribute to the project?

- How do people contribute to the project?

Answering the first question about your project’s onboarding process requires a good deal of work. Incoming contributors need to know what would be the most helpful contributions they could make. Quite a few projects have set up tagging on their source code repositories for "first-time contributors" or something similar, which is an excellent way to direct incoming contributors to solving issues and bugs while also introducing newcomers to the source material of the project.

The second question—regarding "where to contribute"—is one that projects don’t pose as often as you’d think. Project veterans might dismissively say, "what you need is on the forums" or "read the wiki if you need more detail." But in which specific repository are the material available? Under what organization? And what about other, similarly named projects? Ensure your project website features clear links to places where new contributors can make an impact on the project. These links shouldn’t be buried, either; they should be right on the home page, if possible.

Third is the question of "how to contribute." Too often, projects release their source code, even make it easily discoverable . . . and that’s it. You may have heard others refer to this approach as "throwing it over the wall," and it is not a phrase people tend to use politely. Too many projects will push their code or content into a public place, declare it open to all, and then wonder where all the contributors are. This can be because there is a real barrier to entry, in the lack of documentation and procedures for getting contributions into the project.

Next, let’s discuss discuss some resources and practices your project can use to eliminate these barriers and streamline your project’s onboarding process.

Onboarding resources

A key tool (and practice) for working successfully in an asynchronous environment is good documentation. Since contributors won’t typically have fellow community members available near them to provide impromptu guidance, it’s important to have important community norms, decisions, and processes well-documented in much more detail than they might be in a more traditionl work environment. Whether it’s a landing page, project documentation, wiki page, etc., a good set of references are crucial for new community members to get familiar with the community and get started. It’s also important to ensure that the onboarding documentations are up to date and reflect the latest snapshot of the community’s activity, so you want to make it easy for anyone to help keeping the contents up to date. An easy-to-use documentation tool definitely helps with this, but what’s more important is to cultivate a community culture that impresses on everyone the need for reliable, updated documentation.

This may sound obvious, but another key resource for onboarding is other community members. Even if people do not sit in the same office, having access to experienced community members to help people get started and answer questions can help alleviate the sense of isolation in the early days. Something simple like onboarding buddies who can jump on a welcome call may be enough for a small community that is relatively new. For larger and more established communities, people may have seen working groups focused on onboarding or even community members with formal titles such as coaches or mentors.

Once people resoures for onboarding are in place, this information (especially on who to reach out for help) needs to be posted in multiple places so that people feel welcome to contact their onboarding resources and feel encouraged to ask questions. If getting help is difficult, new comers will feel discouraged from engaging with the community and even decide that the community may not be for them afterall.

Whether it’s onboarding buddies, mentors, working groups, etc., you want to have a large enough pool of volunteers so that these volunteers don’t feel burned out with onboarding activities especially as the community grows. What is important is to have a culture within the community so that there is an expectation on everyone to help welcome new community members. Ideally, what we want to see is a lot of people volunteering to help others whether or not they have a formal title as a coach or a mentor. If you have a formal program for onboarding working group, mentors, etc., you should not set a high barrier to entry for community members to become an official onboarding resource. The most important qualification should be people’s willingness to help others versus other factors such as their tenure in the community or technical expertise in the project. The people who are helping with onboarding do not need to have all the answers. Rather, they need to help newcomers find answers quicker and not work alone.

Onboarding practices

When people join a new community, they may find following discussions on communication channels (such as mailing lists or Slack) to be overwhelming. To alleviate their confusion or stress, consider creating spaces in these channels specifically for new community members to use as they get started and acclimated. For example, dedicated channels such as "getting started" or "introductions" can be good places for people to feel safe asking newcomer questions. These channels also allow more experienced community members to assist with onboarding by helping answer newscomer questions or even simply by offering encouragement. It all goes a long way to making new community members feel welcome as they’re getting started.

Once new community members feel oriented and comfortable enough to begin contributing to an open source project, their next questions will be "Where can I contribute?"

So to help newcomers get started, you may wish to develop a list of work items that new community members in particular can tackle. Many communities label issues in their issue trackers with something like "good for first time contributors," "good first issue," or "help wanted," so newscomers can more easily identify tasks with which they can help immediately. Issues with these labels could range from documentation errors, easy bug fixes, or other simple tasks that will help new contributors experience early successes and therefore build their confidence. Having a contact person (or people) servinvg as mentors or coaches listed on these issues (in case people need help getting started) can also be helpful. Always remember: Issues that may seem simple to experienced community members might not be as simple for newcomers.

Many open source communities organize events aimed at connecting their members. Whether the events are collocated or virtual, they provide excellent opportunities for community members to collaborate synchronously—and get to know each other in the process. These events could be summits, hackathons, user confernces, etc. At these events, consider creating special programming or spaces for new community members. You might organize formal orientation sessions as a "Day 0" event if your budget allows for it, or a lunchtime session at which newcomers can meet other community members so they know who they can ask questions to later on.

Contributor pathways

Once new contributors have made their initial contributions to your project, they’ll begin looking for ways to make more significant impacts. To do this, they’ll often look for ways they can apply their specific skills and talents to the project.

Opportunities for volunteers to begin lending their unique talents to an open source project are called that project’s "contributor pathways." The greater the number of contributor pathways your project features, the more likely it is to recruit participants with the various skills required for the project’s success.

Your project will have any number of contributor pathways specific to it, but these pathways will generally fall into two basic categories: pathways with a community focus and those with a technical focus.

Community-focused pathways are opportunities for contribution that may not require specialized technical knowledge on the part of participants. These are pathways focused on helping new contributors document the project, raise awareness of and market the project, plan community meetings and events, etc.—all extraordinarily important aspects of a project’s eventual success. Examples include:

1. Documenting workflow and governance processes

2. Onboarding and mentoring new members

3. Localizing content into various languages

4. Copywriting (for website, newsletters, blogs)

5. Managing social media

6. Organizing events

Technically focused contributor pathways, on the other hand, are contributions requiring specialized knowledge of software development (often in a particular computing language). These pathways are focused on enchancing or refining the body of software a community maintains. Examples include:

1. Adding new features and documentation

2. Fixing existing bugs and triaging issues

3. Refactoring existing work to improve it

4. Performing quality assurance

5. Improving user interface and user experience

6. Release engineering

7. Creating and maintaining project roadmap

8. Code and user interface localization

When assessing your project’s contributor pathways, ask yourself: Does your project currently offer new (and existing) contributors opportunities to contribute rewardingly to (or even take ownership of) work in each of these areas? If not, one general way to begin expanding your project is by making concerted efforts to formalize, refine, document, and advertise these contributor pathways.

We call these "pathways" because they allow participants to deepen investment in the community gradually so they don’t feel overwhelemed and can acclimate themselves to the project’s processes and culture as they become more involved. Ideally, as your community matures, it will construct pathways that incrementally confer more responsibility and authority on contributors. Contributors following your project’s contributor pathway related to events, for example, probably won’t get started by taking sole responsibility for your community’s flagship annual event. But they might work with experienced community members on planning that event, taking charge of securing a venue, advertising, registration, and more.

Resources: Onboarding examples from open source communities

1. OpenStack Upstream Institute

2. Kubernetes Contributor Experience Special Interest Group

3. GitLab Merge Request Coach

Creating a Culture of Mentorship

Introduction

This chapter discusses mentorship, a concept important to open source maintainers interested in creating sustainable projects and communities. It examines what mentoring is, why it’s important, and how you might begin cultivating a culture of mentorship in your open source community.

What is mentorship?

Mentorship means different things to different people, depending on their situation, context, culture, and more. To some, for example, mentorship is a formal activity involving a schedule and agenda. To others, mentorship is an informal process among peers; it can even be a one-time conversation. If you ask people to define "mentorship," you will most likely receive wide-ranging responses.

That is what makes mentorship such an important and powerful concept: it is both universal and personal. It’s universal insofar as it has potential to be a positive experience for anyone, yet personal insofar as it occurs differently for every individual and in every relationship.

Therefore, one way of thinking of mentorship is the following:

Mentorship is an act, experience, and opportunity to share what you can, when you can, how you can.

Mentorship is important. It helps you, it helps others, it helps the community, and it helps the open source project.

It helps you

Mentoring can be a personally rewarding experience. The help and guidance you offer can have valuable, lasting benefits. For example:

- Experience the positive emotions of giving back.

- Learn more about yourself.

- Find knowledge gaps in your own thinking.

- Learn something new.

- Expand your world view.

- Make a new friend, ally, or supporter.

- And more.

It helps others

Mentorship helps contributors navigating different stages of their careers or different life circumstances. Mentorship has the potential for positive impact (big and small, yet valuable just the same), whether it occurs among people in a specific project of initiative, in general as people get started with the project, and as people grow and advance in their educations and careers.

It helps the community

Mentoriship has a cumulative effect on community coherence and identity. It might begin between two people, when one person mentors another. But that person may mentor someone else in turn—and the positive ripple effect continues. It might even become a sort of "boomerang of help" that returns to you when you need a helping hand or some advice.

At scale, it helps contribute towards more inclusive, collaborative, helpful, and innovative communities.

It helps the project

Creating a culture of mentorship—or even a sopecific mentoring program—is important and valuable to the long-term health of an open source project. The rest of this chapter will discuss those benefits specifically.

Forms and styles of mentorship

Recall that mentorship is an act, experience, and opportunity to share what you can, when you can, how you can.

In an open source project, this can manifest in various ways. It can be informal, formal, peer-to-peer, mentor-to-mentee, and other variants. The relationship dynamics can also differ, such to one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many. The how and when communication occurs also varies, such as asynchronous or synchronous. The kinds of questions being asked and the responses can also influence how mentorship occurs.

Another thing to keep in mind is how people mentor and the different roles they assume. Below are some type of styles (not an exhaustive list, there are plenty).

Educator

- Teach and inform on concepts, ideas, and more.

- Help explain and clarify material.

- Share knowledge and experiences.

Encourager

- Provide encouragement.

- Remind them of their progress, accomplishments.

- Fuel potential to keep doing great work.

Listener

- Instead of solely providing answers and guidance, actively listen.

- Radiate solidarity and acknowledge that folks are being heard.

Finder/Researcher

- Discover questions/resources/people that can provide insights.

Connector

- Share resources such as articles, books, media, events, and programs. Introduce people to each other

In summary, it is beneficial to acknowledge that mentorship can go beyond traditionally providing guidance. There are various ways to mentor and in doing so, it provides valuable and lasting benefits for the contributors, open source project, and community.

Mentoring new contributors

Part of starting, or growing, a successful open source community is designing the community to be sustainable. This means the project needs to be able to reliably, and repeatedly, bring in new people and help them become ongoing contributors. Let’s talk about how mentoring new contributors is crucial to enabling a community to be sustainable.

If this matches your projects’s version of sustainable, then a mentoring program is absolutely crucial. It’s at the center of how to take a project from "three people who know and do everything" to make it something many people can contribute to in a self-sustaining fashion.

Self-sustainability is an important focus for a mentoring program. And don’t think anyone goes from "mentoring people" to "a mentoring program" by accident. Here’s the argument:

1. If we can agree that lowering the barriers for entry into a project is key to bringing in new people; and

2. If we can agree that people coming into a new project benefit from having one or more people they feel permitted and even encouraged to ask questions and learn from; and

3. If we can agree new people having lackluster or negative interactions with existing project members is likely to drive the new people away; and

4. If we can agree that having a person (mentor, friend) for new people to turn to is a way to prevent the driving-away and especially prevent silent segfaults (people just disappearing with no explanation);

5. Then we can see that doing mentoring with even a tiny bit of repeatable process support is going to yield better, more satisfying results than an ad-hoc process.

Once you agree that even a lightweight program is better than an ad-hoc process, we’re going in the right direction. With this in mind, here are a few absolute must-have elements to include in your mentoring program.

Written, iterative process

Even if it’s lightweight, write it down and give it an initial try.

For that first e.g. six months, get a handful of volunteers to try out the program. This gives time to work out the kinks in processes, and to attract more mentors for when you make the program more prominent.

When you have a process you have tried and tested once or twice, put up a "Mentoring" section on your project website and include links to all the elements of your mentoring program. Make sure people who have even the slightest inkling of getting involved in the project can look ahead and see how they are going to be taken care of as a new contributor.

After each full mentoring period (refer to time commitment, below), conduct a retrospective to learn from the mentoring period and improve the process iteratively.

It’s not just promising there will be a map and directions, it is showing the actual map and idea of what the directions will be.

Mentoring guidelines and a Code of Conduct for your mentors

Even people who are very experienced at mentoring benefit from having guidelines for how to mentor and work with mentoring subjects (mentees), mentoring ethics, and so forth.

As a deeper reference when creating a mentoring program, there is an upstream guide to mentoring itself. You can use materials from that project to create the elements your mentoring program needs.

Mentors have a special role of trust—the project trusts them to represent the community, and the mentees (mentoring subjects) trust the mentor to lead them down the right path. Mentors need to conduct themselves with an appropriate standard, and there needs to be a way to keep them accountable to that standard and report problems or abuses of conduct by mentors. Such a Code of Conduct needs to be visible up front and prominent for everyone looking at your mentoring program.

Not having a Code of Conduct for your mentors, or making it hard to find, is a warning signal to potential new contributors that this project should be avoided.

If your project already has a Code of Conduct, make sure it is sufficient to cover the mentoring program, and make sure all participants are aware of its existence.

Mentors make mentors

It’s one thing to have a few mentors and to start a mentoring program. But to make it sustainable, the mentoring program needs to doing more than attracting mentors, it needs to be creating new mentors.

The core idea is to make sure that your mentors are also teaching explicitly and by example "how to be a mentor." Your mentors should be thinking overall and in specific instances, How can I help this person be successful at mentoring other contributors? That way new mentors are made of people who have had positive experiences as mentees and are also encouraged in their own mentoring activities beyond.

A new contributor who is mentored well can immediately turn around and offer similar mentoring lessons to other contributors, new and existing alike. Even the same day.

Whenever you are answering a question for a new contributor, how you answer that question is where mentoring comes in. You can answer in such a way that this new contributor feels empowered to share their new-found knowledge. If they take in the lesson of not just what was conveyed but how it was conveyed, they carry this simple lesson of mentoring forward with their own interactions across the project.

Easy norms for mentees

Unlike your mentors, you want the fewest demands and lightest burdens for your mentees.

This is information that should be prominent on your mentoring program webpages, and can cover:

- In our project, here is how to find and/or approach a mentor.

- What the work/effort commitment for a mentee is likely to be.

- Clarify the relationship, e.g., a mentor is specifically not a friendship role; the mentoring may be time-bound (six months, etc.) or otherwise have a box once left means the mentoring has concluded; mentors are volunteers and deserve equal respect; mentors are held to a Code of Conduct that mentees should know and follow as well. And so forth.

- What does a normal mentor/mentee relationship look like in this specific project.

You are looking for a balance where mentees know what is expected of them, while leaving space for the mentor to help grow that understanding of project norms, from technical to cultural.

Named person or group who leads the mentoring program

For everything from people being stuck, through to disappearing mentors, to Code of Conduct violations, there needs to be a clear and obvious person or persons to contact.

This contact information and its purpose should be prominent on your mentoring program webpages.

This group will be one of the rare areas of your project that maintains privacy and a well-understood barrier to transparency for specific topics. Mentors need to be able to talk with other mentors to seek guidance; this group can provide that private space. It can also help with any sensitive matters that arise.

The governance for this group or role needs to have a clear and short escalation path to the highest levels of project leadership.

A reasonable time and effort commitment plan for mentors

Mentoring relationships can last years or be completed in a weekend. Make a reasonable schedule, perhaps one that is tied to your release schedule or other rhythms such as specific conferences or events you organize around.

For some projects' experience, the six-month commitment seems to work well. It is enough time to get to know each other, talk through how to help as a mentor/be helped as a mentee, and then some months in the middle for the mentees to actually get feedback on real activities.

Especially if you are starting out, you want to attract mentors. If there is too long of a time and effort commitment, or if there is not clear closure to a round of mentoring, many potential mentors will not join or even inquire further about your program.

Making the time and effort commitment nebulous is like sprinkling mentoring repellant on your project. Be clear on what participants are getting into, and your mentoring program can be on a path to success.

Mentoring new community managers

This section was informed by a meeting of community managers, talking about their experiences around mentoring and new community managers.

In the early days of open source, projects did not have community managers. Collaboration among developers was a given, and if you were lucky, some people in your community enjoyed tasks other than software development, like tending to infrastructure, organizing events, or leading a marketing team. As open source has matured, there are many more projects created from within large companies, and these things are no longer a given. Increasingly, people inside those companies are designated the Community Manager or Community Architect, and are tasked with ensuring that projects run well as collaborative, multi-vendor efforts.

Much has been written here about what a community manager may or may not do—but if one thing is certain, it is that projects evolve, and the role of community manager evolves with them.

In the life of a project, a time may come when the original community manager is moving on—to a different job, a different role in the project, or just taking a back seat because of life.

During these transition periods, a new community manager may emerge in the project.

During this period, it can be tempting, as the outgoing community manager, to jump in and start helping the new community person come up to speed. The risk, however, is that you deprive the new person of an opportunity to make the role their own. They will certainly have a different conception of the most important jobs to be done, and a different skill set to bring to bear on the project.

As a mentor, it is important to strike a balance between being a resource, sharing relevant history, and saying how things have been done.

What is the best way for more experienced community managers successfully mentor newer community managers? How can you help them to be successful, allowing them the very valuable space to try new things, even if they will potentially fail along the way? How do you balance scoping the role, while allowing them to define the role in the way that they see fit?

Chart the waters

One of the things that is most useful when you are coming into a new role is a list of the people with whom you will be working.

If there are stakeholders who might be able to help you, or people you will work with who have concerns about community goals, this information will enable a new person to come into the role and avoid any pitfalls or faux-pas.

As the outgoing community manager, one of the most valuable things you can do for the new community manager is to introduce them to people who you have worked with, to smooth the transition, and ensure that they don’t have to spend minutes explaining who they are and why they are turning up in places where they are not expected.

Give room to fail

A common theme among people who have had bad mentorship experiences is the omnipresent micro-manager. One community manager described an experience where they took on a community role from someone who was stretched too thin. However, everything that they did in the role resulted in email correcting them and telling them how they should have done the task differently. As a result, they drifted away from taking on the role. One question more than any can make a person in a new role feel small and inadequate: "Why didn’t you just…?"

A new person in any role will do things differently than the person who went before. There can be a few reasons for that. Maybe they don’t know how to do it the way it was done in the past. There may be reasons which led to you doing things the way you did, but they’re unaware of the history. It’s also possible that they bring a different skill set and perspective to the role, and their way is just as valid and just as good.

Whatever the reason, avoid asking your mentee "why didn’t you…?"

You have to give the new person in the role the freedom to do things differently. Even if they make mistakes, it is important that they feel ownership over the role.

As a mentor, one of the hardest things is to watch someone struggle to do something which you have done in the past. That does not mean that you should completely abandon your new community manager. Instead of telling them what to do, ensure that you have good documentation for tasks they will need to do in the role, and point them at the documentation.

This gives them guided experience, while showing up any places where documentation is lacking and also giving them the freedom to tweak things along the way.

Help them with visibility

Ironically for the most public-facing people in a project, people in community roles can see their careers suffer for lack of visibility. More than one person mentioned seeing their careers suffer because their management chain was unaware of the work they were doing, or did not understand its value.

As the experienced community manager, one of the best gifts you can offer a junior community person is being a credible cheerleader for their work.

New community managers can get stretched thin, or can focus their efforts on tasks that do not provide a significant impact on the community.

As a mentor, you have an opportunity to help them channel their efforts on aspects of the role that provide value to the sponsoring company, in addition to benefiting the community.

You may also have the ability to communicate their successes in a way that will help their management chain understand the value that they bring to the project.

Get started

Guiding a new community manager through their first few months on the job can be a very rewarding experience. As the experienced person, you can help them be effective and successful, give them confidence in their ability to execute in a new role, and increase the amount of community knowledge in your company and in the industry.

What would the first 30 days of a mentorship program for a new community manager look like? You might try to:

- Maintain a weekly one-on-one call so that they can ask you for advice and help as they feel the need.

- Organize introduction meetings with five stakeholders across different functional areas of the project, to help them chart the waters of the project.

- Identify three recurring tasks they will take over, and arm them with documentation on how you managed the activity.

- Help them identify two high-value, high-visibility projects to deliver in their first month, and communicate their work when they are delivered.

Beyond the first month, you should be fading increasingly into the shadows, moving your one-on-one calls to every two weeks, and providing guidance on-demand only.

If you have done your job well, your mentee will be well on their way to making the job their own.

Conclusion

This chapter discussed what mentoring is, why it is vitally important to your open source project, and how it helps you and others. Then it described why and how to make a mentoring program for your community. Finally, the chapter concludes with why and how to mentor a new community manager who is taking a role you already are familiar with.

Project and Community Governance

Introduction

In this chapter, we’ll discuss assessing and evolving an open source project or community governance model.

All organizations operate in and with governance structures. The term "governance" carries multiple meanings in an organizational context. It can refer to regulatory matters or risk management issues, for example. More generally, though, it can also refer to a system of rules, roles, and procedures that determine how power in an organization gets distributed.

Because open source projects are organizations, every one features governance structures. Some of these structures are more explicit than others. Some are more formal than others. But every project has them.

Unfortunately, too many discussions of open source project governance focus on activities or resources, like "speaking for the project" or "ownership of the web domain." While documenting these functions is useful, we should remember that these are aspects of a project’s governance, but they are not the full extent of it. At its heart, open source project and community governance is about people—their rights and responsibilities as part of a project and the expectations others have for them.

What is governance?

Simply put, "governance" refers to, "The rules or customs that determine who gets to do what (or is supposed to do what), how they’re supposed to do it, and when."

Two categories of governance-related issues are most pertinent to open source projects: those related to roles and those related to policies and procedures. For the purpose of explanation, we’ll discuss each of these issues separately. In practice, however, they’re inseparable—two sides of the same coin, as our forthcoming example will demonstrate.

Roles

A great deal of activity hinges on roles-related governance in open source projects. Think of a role as a function someone in the project performs.

When analyzing your own project’s roles-related governance systems, ask the following questions:

- What roles do (or can) project contributors play?

- What qualifies a person to play a particular role in the project?

- What duties, privileges, and forms of authority are associated with each role?

- What project resources are the province or responsibility of people who perform certain roles?

Policies and procedures

While contributors occupy certain roles in an open source project, the project’s governance structure also determines how those people do what they do as part of the project. Policies and procedures refer to the processes and guidelines contributors follow when performing their roles.

When analyzing your project’s procedure- or policy-related governance systems, ask the following questions:

- How do various contributions get accepted into the project?

- How do contributors come to occupy and eventually depart from certain roles in the project?

- How can role descriptions and responsibilities be changed?

- How do project decisions get made (and by whom)?

- How are debates and conflicts resolved (and by whom)?

Roles, policies, procedures: an example

Remember: A project’s roles and its policies and procedures aren’t discrete; they’re interwoven as part of the project’s overall governance model. For example, consider a project role called "Documentation Maintainer." A project might outline that role this way:

1. Role Title: Documentation Maintainer

2. Qualifications: several years of consistent contributions to documentation

3. Access to Role: other Documentation Maintainers can nominate and vote to grant this role to eligible contributors

4. Duties: write documentation and review documentation from other contributors

5. Privileges: speak for the documentation team, participate in development meetings

6. Authority: ultimate decision on documentation content, technology, and strategy

7. Change Procedure: other Documentation Maintainers vote on changes to role description

In many cases, a project’s actual role descriptions are more elaborate than that (some projects' role handbooks are dozens of pages long). As projects mature, the number of different roles people play in them can increase. Moreover, larger and more mature projects associate roles with collectives—that is, a group of contributors can perform a certain role jointly. For instance, a project might feature several "steering committees," each with its own set of election procedures. This is true for the Kubernetes project, where "special interest groups" are a popular unit of governance. In that project, the role of Code Contributor is subdivided further by interest group (team) and by contributor level (Member, Reviewer, Approver, and Owner). So a contributor’s actual role would be something like "SIG‒Network Approver," not just "Code Contributor."

Why governance?

In some open source communities, the idea of "governance" has a poor reputation. This is true in cases where project contributors tend to construe governance as a purely negative force—a set of rules or procedures aimed solely at telling people what they can’t do, how they shouldn’t act, or how they should limit themselves to acting only within certain boundaries.

But a well-crafted governance model can in fact be a largely positive force in open source communities. A project’s governance model outlines that project’s terms of engagement—the specific, tried-and-tested structures for working together and making decisions that project contributors have found works best for the community. A clear governance model encourages new contributors to become involved in your project.

A well-designed system of governance is much less likely to turn away or de-motivate project participants than a vague or non-existent one is. Consider your project from the perspective of new contributors. Are new contributors more or less likely to jump into a project without any sense of the role they’re supposed to play and the rules they’re supposed to follow when they want others to seriously consider your contributions? A clear governance model helps people understand precisely how they can make an immediate contribution to a project, how they can pitch in without upsetting the project’s rhythms, how they can escalate questions or issues if they have them, and what sorts of leadership positions they can aspire to if they stick around long enough. So a community’s goal in architecting a governance model should be, "Make structures of participation obvious." When your project’s rules are clear, contributors can engage with confidence. Taking this approach to governance can positively impact a project’s long-term viability and growth.

Making governance explicit

Recall that every open source project features different roles contributors can play and procedures that people in those roles are typically (or should be) following. This is true whether or not those roles and procedures are actually documented anywhere. Where roles aren’t documented, they are implicit in regular contributors' activities (and not infrequently a source of argument). Successful open source projects make their governance models explicit.

In a 2018 study, researcher Javier Canovas found that 19 of the 25 most-starred projects on GitHub hadn’t published documents outlining their governance models. Canovas considered this unfortunate for several reasons.

"First, [explicit governance] helps promote an organization’s sense of transparency," he writes. "One could know how much time a group takes to consider an issue, the chances contributions have of making an impact on the organization, or who is going to hear their voices when they speak up. Second, explicitly defining a governance model may also help one better understand and classify how open organizations are driven."

Here’s an example of how this works: in 2018, the Kubernetes project added a set of detailed, comprehensive Role Handbooks for their Release Team. These handbooks outlined information related to the Release Team role, including qualifications necessary for joining the team, duties members of the team perform, and details on the team’s decision-making processes. As a result, the Release Team became the most popular point of entry for project contributions; new participants knew exactly what to expect. Other teams within Kubernetes followed suit—and experienced a doubling or even tripling of the number of new contributors.

Clear and explicit governance models have another critical benefit—cultivating a strong sense of trust in your project’s community. Members of projects with robust, detailed governance models benefit from a shared commitment to a transparent set of procedures, policies, and role descriptions. They can appeal to a commonly understood set of guidelines when disputes arise. All of this makes questions about participants' motives, intentions, goals, and authority less contentious.

How community-originated projects evolve

Open source projects rarely begin by "selecting" and implementing a perfectly preconceived governance model. Much more commonly, projects' governance models evolve as their communities grow and diversify.

In its early days, a project might only have one or two developers, making discussions of "governance" largely irrelevant (the project is simply not big enough to have a need for any structured decision-making process). But this will change as the project attracts additional contributors. And because a project’s governance model, its culture, and the behaviors of its leaders are all intimately entwined, any change to one will likely spur changes in the others. While every project is different—growing in its own way and following its own trajectory of maturation—we might note certain common, recurring milestones in a project’s development that tend to trigger governance evolutions.

Work among founders (1 or 2 members)

Projects that start with a single developer (or small group of developers) do not often require any formal governance structure. Gauging consensus is easy, and during the early stages of a project, disagreements about what should be done (and who should do it) are rare. A project’s early members all typically have carte blanche to take the actions they see as best for the project, like approving code for inclusion. Normally, no structure is required in addition to a GitHub repository, and all early developers receive project membership status almost immediately.

Early project growth (up to 5 members)

As projects begin growing, the limitations of this approach become obvious. When a project has even five developers, coordinating work becomes more difficult, and newer developers may not be immediately familiar with the design choices and coding standards the project’s early developers have followed.

So the first evolution projects tend to undergo is often one that requires code submissions to undergo peer review before being merged. The "first level" of the project’s hierarchy consists of those with the authority to approve pull requests or code and content submissions for inclusion in the project. Initially, deciding who receives this authority is easy; the project’s original, trusted developers all receive it, and the project founder acts as final arbiter in case of disagreements.

Mid-term project growth (10 to 15 members)

The next event to trigger a project governance evolution is often related to how people who join the project become recognized members of the group. This tends to occur when the size of the project has increased to approximately 10 or 15 developers. At this point, a project community typically must develop more formal guidelines for admitting new project members.

One common standard projects use to assess new members is sustained participation (how long and how often the contributor has been active in the project) combined with a judgment about what one might call "good taste"—an assessment about the quality of work a contributor tends to submit, that contributor’s good judgement in review comments, etc. Still, the project founder tends to be the gatekeeper and final arbiter of who gets promoted inside the project.

How corporate-originated projects evolve

Some open source projects that begin life as the work of a professional software development team operating in a corporate environment tend to evolve somewhat differently. Because these projects originate in corporate environments, they often inherit the organizational structure of those environments. They may, for example, already feature a robust group of developers with their own notions of hierarchy (managers, architects, junior and senior developers, and so on).

Early-stage corporate-originated projects

Initial efforts to increase community engagement in the projects tends to focus on growing adoption and engaging with early users. Pre-existing developer teams typically continue project planning, however, in a centralized manner. For this reason, external contributors may find engaging with the project more difficult—and the project may not gain sufficient traction as a result. The rapid pace of project changes, the opacity of the planning process, and the strength of pre-existing relationships between the project’s developers can make feature development more difficult for external contributors. Early patch submissions may stay unreviewed for longer periods of time, and these submissions will be relatively infrequent.

This is as far as many corporate-originated projects will evolve. While the core team may engage actively with the project’s user base, resources required to grow that developer base are considerable, and many organizations choose not to make the investment.

However, one oft-cited benefit of the open source model is an ability to collaborate with industry partners and competitors and share the burden of development of common requirements. If this is a goal, then growing participation in a corporate-originated project beyond a single vendor is critical.

Evolving to multi-vendor corporate open source

For corporate-originated projects, expanding project participation involves engaging with both interested individuals who are using the project and vendors who might be motivated to invest in the project. Uniting these parties will have implications for project governance.

Many projects begin enticing other vendors to contribute by demonstrating a viable market for the project. Vendors typically do not invest sustainably in open source projects unless they can justify that investment. Illustrating significant and enthusiastic user adoption of the software is therefore critical at this stage. Initial efforts focus on accelerating adoption momentum and successfully converting users into contributors by soliciting their active participation in the project roadmap and project promotion.

Alternatively, a project may attempt to engage with other vendors by focusing on encouraging collaborators to "build on" a common platform. While companies may not be able to justify significant investment in the project "core," they may be able to justify investment in extensions to a project—if those extensions are relatively inexpensive and can support their business.

For example, by focusing initial outreach and engagement efforts on the APIs, the developer experience for extensions, and the path to distribution for people writing those extensions, projects may grow large communities of vendors building atop a platform, rather than modifying the core platform itself. Distinguishing these two areas of development—between the "core" and the "periphery"—often involves making governance decisions specific to each (only some project roles may receive permission to operate in the project "core," for instance).

When a corporate-originated project has demonstrated substantial market opportunity (either by proving that the project fills a significant gap in the market or by growing a large user base directly), it can engage with potential vendor partners to collaborate on the project. This discussion is partly technical and partly business-focused.

Before making a significant investment of engineering resources in a project, vendors will likely ask:

- Can we engage with the project on a level playing field? Or do stakeholders use different processes to evaluate changes from different vendors (Contributor Licensing Agreements that give additional rights to the originating vendor over others, for example)? One common way to ensure a level playing field from a legal perspective is to contribute the project’s management and trademark to a foundation.

- Does this project meet a customer need? Vendors will consider market fit, and how the project fits into their product portfolio.

Accepting participation from additional vendors can significantly impact a project’s governance. One way to ease potentially turbulent impacts is to target vendors with whom the originating vendor does not compete directly. For example, a cloud hosting company may have more success recruiting a vendor of on-premise software products to its project than it would recruiting a competing hosting vendor. Competing vendors may only be willing to join when a project can demonstrate a consistent record of multi-vendor engagement in the project.

Governing sustained evolution

Once project participation reaches a kind of "critical mass," many common patterns emerge—regardless of whether an individual or corporation has initiated a project.

In all the cases we’ve discussed so far, rules and procedures for decision making tend to be implicit. And since most open source projects never recruit more than 10 active developers (or one core vendor), most projects never reach a point where explicitly documenting project governance becomes necessary. Those that do, however, will likely adopt even more nuanced and complex governance models. Refer to "Examples of open source governance models" below to learn more about these.

Sometimes, when projects reach this size, they seek to transition management and trademark of a project to an independent entity (usually called "foundations" in the open source world). On rare occasions, projects may establish their own independent consortium for this purpose. More frequently, however, a project will approach an existing foundation (such as the Apache Software Foundation, the Linux Foundation, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation, the OpenStack Foundation, or the Software Freedom Conservancy, to name just a few) and ask the foundation to adopt the project.

When selecting a foundation with whom to partner in this way, open source projects must make several considerations, including:

1. Cost structure;

2. Governance requirements imposed by the foundation;

3. Affinity of the foundation with the user and developer base of the project.

At this point, projects will commonly discuss the extent to which member fees should influence the project’s technical governance. Two dominant models for this governance exist.

The first is a strict separation of funding and technical inputs, where the members who join at the highest membership level have input into (and can influence) project budgetary matters (for example, how funds will be disbursed between infrastructure, headcount, marketing, events), but technical merit dictates how the project is governed technically. The second is a "pure member" organization, where members are entitled to appoint representatives to a technical governing board with oversight on which sub-projects will be adopted in the project, and how the projects will be governed.

Foundations can play another key role in a project’s evolution: defining the market dynamics around the project, including administration of the project trademark. A trademark is one of an open source project’s most valuable resources for guaranteeing that vendors are distributing the project (or derivatives of it) in a way that does not damage the project’s reputation. Open source projects commonly use trademark certification as a way to "bless" certain vendor products in the market or to influence the way derivative products behave.

Some projects hold tightly to the idea that contributors are individual contributors and not representatives of companies for which they may happen to work. In mature open source projects (like the Linux kernel), this allows people to maintain community status and seniority even when they change employers.

Examples of open source project governance models

"Do-ocracy"

Open source projects adopting the "do-ocracy" governance model tend to forgo formal and elaborate governance conventions and instead insist that "decisions are made by those who do the work." In other words: In a do-ocracy, members gain authority by making the most consistent contributions. Peer review remains common under this model; however, individual contributors tend to retain de facto decision-making power over project components on which they’ve worked most closely.

For this reason, some do-ocracies will claim to have "no governance at all," relying instead on individual stakeholders' authority to make decisions on matters "where they’ve done the most work." But as we’ve already explained, such claims about an absence of governance are misguided. Every open source project has a governance model. In the case of most do-ocracies, the governance model is merely implicit in the everyday interactions of project members. As a result, joining them can be difficult and intimidating for newcomers, as would-be contributors might not immediately know how to participate or seek approval for their contributions.

To get started in a project with this governance model: Find an aspect of the project you feel you can improve and simply begin working. Review the recorded history of changes to the project to identify the participants whose feedback will be integral to your successful contribution. As the project accepts more of your contributions, you will gradually accrue influence in the community. Do not expect to influence decisions in a do-ocracy until you are able to demonstrate a history of successful contribution.

Founder-leader

The founder-leader governance model is most common among new projects or those with a small number of contributors (and since most open source projects have only a small number of contributors, this is a rather popular model!). In these projects, the individual or group who started the project also administers the project, establishes its vision, controls all permissions to merge code into it, and assumes the right to speak for it in public. Some projects refer to their founder-leaders as "BDFLs" or "Benevolent Dictators for Life," a term that is falling out of fashion.

In projects following the founder-leader model, lines of power and authority are typically quite clear; they radiate from founder-leaders, who are the final decision-makers for all project matters. This model’s limitations become apparent as a project grows to a certain size. Separating the founder-leaders' personal preferences from project design decisions eventually becomes difficult, and founder-leaders can become bottlenecks for project decision-making work. In extreme cases, founder-leader models can create a kind of "caste" system in a project, as non-founders begin feeling like they’re unable to affect changes that aren’t in line with a founder’s vision. Disagreements can lead to project splits. Worse, a founder-leader’s disappearance, whether due to burnout or planned retirement, can cause a project to disintegrate entirely.

To get started in a project with this governance model: Browse project mailing lists or discussion forums to identify the project’s founder-leaders, then address questions about participation and contribution to those leaders through one of the community’s public communication channels. Founder-leaders tend to have a comprehensive view of the project’s needs and will direct you to areas of the project that will benefit most from your contribution. Be sure to understand founder-leaders' vision for the project, as most founder-leaders will veto proposed changes they feel conflict with that vision. When starting out, do not expect to propose changes that will not serve the founder-leaders' vision for the project.

Self-appointing council or board

Recognizing shortcomings of the founder-leader model, the self-appointing council or board model aims to better facilitate community leadership turnover and succession. Under this model, members of an open source project may appoint a number of leadership groups to govern various aspects of a project. Such groups may have names like "steering committee," "committer council," "technical operating committee, "architecture council," or "board of directors." And typically, these groups construct their own decision-making conventions and succession procedures.

The self-appointing council or board governance model is useful in cases where a project does not have a sponsoring foundation and establishing electoral mechanisms is prohibitively difficult. But the model’s drawbacks become apparent when self-appointing governing groups grow insular and unrepresentative of the entire project community (as member-selection processes tend to spawn self-reinforcing leadership cultures). Moreover, this model can stymie community participation in leadership activities, as community members often feel like they must "wait to be chosen" before they can take initiative on work that interests them.

To get started in a project with this governance model: Because this governance model is typical of more mature open source projects, communities adopting this model will often curate getting started documentation aimed at assisting potential contributors. Find this documentation and read it first. Then read the project’s governance documentation to determine how its governing bodies are composed. In many cases, you can locate a council or board governing the part of the project where you would like to make a contribution. That body will be able to oversee your contribution and answer questions you may have.

Electoral

Some open source projects choose to conduct governance through elections. They may hold elections for various roles, or conduct similar electoral processes to ratify or update project policies and procedures. Under the electoral model, communities establish and document electoral procedures to which they all agree, then enact those procedures as a regular matter of decision-making.

This model is more common in larger open source projects where multiple qualified and interested contributors offer to play the same role. Elections are also common for projects with a sponsor (a foundation, for example), because an electoral process can make the allocation of sponsor resources more transparent. Electoral governance also tends to lead to precise documentation of project roles, procedures, and participation guidelines. When election documents make these matters explicit, they help new contributors maximize their involvement in a project.

But elections also have drawbacks. They can become contentious, distracting, and time-consuming for all project members (whether those members are running or not). Some communities promote elections as a solution to the indefinite tenure of well-known project members; however, elections don’t generally cause turnover unless term limits are part of the project’s policies.

To get started in a project with this governance model: Communities appointing leaders through elections typically feature election results and a leadership roster prominently on their project websites. Review those documents to determine a point of contact in the project. Well-governed open source communities will it make clear on their project websites their processes for proposing and reviewing items that the community can vote on. As you establish a reputation for making useful contributions to the project, you may eventually decide to be a candidate for a project leadership position. Be sure to interact productively and collaborate effectively with other contributors as they may be voting you into a leadership position some day.

Single-vendor

Occasionally, individual companies or industry consortia may choose to distribute software under the terms of an open source license as a way of reaching potential developers and users—even if they do not accept project contributions from those audiences. They might do this to accelerate adoption of their work, spur development activity atop a software platform, support a plugin ecosystem, or avoid the overhead required for cultivating an external developer community.

Under this model, the governing organization usually does not accept contributions from anyone outside it. Instead, open and closed source innovation occurs at the edges of the project, just where it contacts the rest of the world. For this reason, some commentators call this the "walled garden" governance model. Occasionally, projects following this model will adopt license with strong "copyleft" requirements, which they see as a deterrent to commercial competitors benefitting from their work on the project (the goal is to force competitors and customers with production requirements to purchase a non-open source license for the software—what some call a "dual-license" approach). This model becomes problematic in cases where a project claims to have an open community but is in fact wholly owned by a company or consortium.

To get started in a project with this governance model: First, consider any existing relationship between your employer and the company originating the project, if applicable. Next, assess the project’s licensing terms and review its change history and bug tracker to determine whether you are able to contribute to the aspect of the project that interests you—and in the way you would like. Given the project’s particular licensing stipulations, you may find yourself working alongside or on top of a particular project rather than contributing to it directly.

Foundation-backed

To exert greater control over resources and project code, some open source projects choose to be managed by an incorporated NGO (non-government organization), such as a charitable nonprofit or trade association. Doing this allows the "project," as an abstract entity, to take ownership of resources like servers, trademarks, patents, and insurance policies.

In some cases, foundation leadership and project leadership can form a single governance structure that manages all aspects of the open source project. In other cases, the foundation manages some matters—such as trademarks and events—and other governance structures in the project(s) control other matters (such as code approval).

Extensive funding and legal requirements normally limit this model to larger open source projects. However, many smaller projects choose to join larger so-called umbrella foundations, such as the Software Freedom Conservancy or the Linux Foundation, to reap some of the benefits of this governance model. This governance model is advantageous for projects seeking to establish legal relationships with third parties (like conference venues) or projects seeking to ensure successful leadership transitions following departure of key individuals. It might also help prevent the commercialization of the project under a single vendor.

High overhead—not strictly financial, but particularly in terms of contributor time, which can be substantial—is a significant drawback of the foundation-backed governance model. Some foundations are incorporated as industry consortia, in which sponsoring companies govern the organization. Different consortia allow different degrees of participation from individual project contributors; some are fairly open groups, while in others only corporate managers have authority.

To get started in a project with this governance model: If a foundation does not govern day-to-day project contribution activity, then locate the project’s getting started documentation and follow it. Otherwise, note that individual projects under a particular foundation’s umbrella will have their own sets of leaders, though some common guidelines may standardize basic contribution processes across all projects a foundation governs. To identify a specific project’s leaders, consider addressing a request to the foundation members' mailing list. You might also examine the project’s change history to identify frequent contributors and contact them. As many foundations feature a contribution-based voting system, familiarize yourself with steps required to become a full voting member of the foundation. If the foundation is a members-only industry consortium, determine whether your employer is already a member. If not, talk to your manager about the importance of the project to your work and ask whether your employer might consider joining. In either case, foundation projects may require signing contributor paperwork. Your legal department should assist with reviewing and signing such paperwork.

Conducting basic governance

So far, we’ve discussed the nature and importance of open source project and community governance, factors that trigger evolutions in project governance models, and a few of the most popular open source governance models. Finally, let’s examine some concrete steps you can take to structure your own community’s governance—whether you’re launching a new project or evolving one that’s already active.

Recall that most governance models consist of two primary dimensions: roles, and policies and procedures. The basic requirements here are actually quite spartan, and can be evolved as the project grows. What follows constitutes a kind of minimum viable product for project governance.

In your project, each of the following sections could very well be its own document. Or they might simply be part of a single long README—or anything in between. What’s important it to get the basics of how things work down in text, so that people thinking about participating in your project know where to go, who to talk to, and most of all aren’t horribly surprised.

The importance of honesty

When writing governance documentation, it can be tempting to define your project as you would like it to be—or how your corporate marketing department would like it to be seen—rather than how it actually is. Particularly, project leaders frequently make the mistake of attempting to make the project appear more democratic than it actually is, in documentation. This falls apart when users or contributors expect your project to live up to its governance documentation, and it doesn’t. People who would have been fine with being told a project was single-company at the outset become very upset if they ask for their committer status and are refused later.

Like technical documentation, governance documentation should explain how things actually work. If there are aspirational goals, those go in their own section under "Roadmap" or "TODO."

Defining roles

As mentioned, your project will have a variety of real roles, but you only need to define a handful of them to start out. Those basic Roles are:

1. Member

2. Contributor

3. Leader

Whether you’ve thought about it, your project already features all these roles you already have in your project. Each one of them should be recorded in a roles document of some kind, either in your project’s documentation or your main source code repository. This allows you to make what was implicit into explicit, both setting expectations for and allowing more people to participate in your project. For each role, you’ll need to define who they are, how they qualify for that role, what they are expected to do, and what their rights and privileges are. Eventually you’ll go beyond these roles and define many more specific ones. But detailing these three will take your project a fair distance on its journey.

Members

This is possibly the least-documented role across all of open source, despite being the most pervasive. Members are the people or organizations who participate in your project and are recognized for it. Depending on how your project is run, these can be subscribers on a mailing list, sponsoring companies, known end-users, participants at an event, or members of a foundation. In some projects, Member is synonymous with Contributor, but in most this is not the case. Most projects have a much larger cadre of people who are involved with the project in some way but are not actively contributing code or content to it.

Defining who Members are requires deciding who the project is actually serving, which is always a critical discussion to have. Are customers of the main sponsoring company automatically project Members? Can companies be Members, or only individuals? Are end-users Members or can they only be Contributors? More than anything, defining Members means defining who it is that project Leaders need to listen to.

For almost all projects, you need to specify what rules Members are subject to (usually a code of conduct and not much else) and what they can expect from Leaders and Contributors. It’s particularly helpful to explain how Members should participate in the project, such as "Members file bugs against this repository, and use the 'new bug' template." Most people, given clear instructions, are happy to channel their participation into the routes you show them.

In projects with democratically elected leadership, Members can be a much more rigorously defined role, because being a Member can come with voting rights. This requires you to more carefully qualify Members to avoid vote-packing or simply derailing election procedures.

Contributors

Far more projects have a written definition of Contributors, but fewer than you’d think. It’s often assumed, in the age of publicly hosted source code control, that you count anyone in the GitHub or GitLab statistics as therefore a Contributor. But defining "who is a Contributor to this project" can be deceptively hard.

Is it anyone who posted on a mailing list, or do you need 100 merged pull requests? Is it just code contributors, or contributors of any kind? What about folks who do events and advocacy? Are staff who work for a contributing company automatically considered Contributors, or do they have to earn it individually? What about someone who contributed a lot of code three years ago, but not since then? Who gets listed in your release credits and how?

The conversation around this will often have a greater effect on your project than the document does.

The Contributor role is also one for which you’ll need to set many more expectations for what Contributors receive in return for their work. This not only includes an explanation of the intellectual property rules of the project (e.g., does the contributor still own their code or not), but also questions like how soon Contributor can expect their submissions to be reviewed and accepted or rejected. Generally, you should also explain how the Contributor will be credited for their participation.

It’s also a place where you set out clearly what rules Contributors need to follow. For example, some projects require Contributors or their employers to sign paperwork officially sharing their copyright or other intellectual property (see below for more on this). You may also require Contributors to do certain things to help maintain the project, such as review others' submissions or help with documentation.

Leaders

As we noted, every project has leadership, even when those leaders are not clearly identified. As such, at a minimum you’ll need to transparently identify who your Leaders are, so that decision-making processes can be clear. Many projects also explain the qualifications and procedure to become a Leader, whether it’s selection by a committee, election, or simply based on your job. If you have a more politically sophisticated project, then those should be written down in a selection/election procedure document as well (refer below), but if it’s simple, selection can just be part of the role document.

What fewer projects put into their leadership role documents is the other parts: the powers and limitations of the Leaders, their duties, and how people leave the role (voluntary or not). It’s very important that everyone know exactly how far a Leader’s authority extends, as well as what they’re responsible for, or you end up with a lot of conflict between Leaders and other project members. Having a set of written duties helps immensely when your leadership team has to decide to remove a project Leader who has stopped participating, but does not want to resign.

If your project is trying to recruit new/additional Leaders, then it’s also important to have a detailed set of qualifications a Leader needs to meet. Contrary to some expectations, having detailed qualifications gives people who want to move up in the project a target to shoot for.

Setting policies and procedures

In addition to some basic role documentation, there’s a certain amount of basic paperwork that each project should create for itself. These policy and procedure (P&P) documents are considered a kind of minimum for what you need in order to grow and mature a project. Your project may, and eventually will, have other P&P docs as your contributor base expands and the number of processes you need to write down with it.

Some of these will be mostly technical (like release process, or a support policy), and we won’t be exploring those here.

However, there are three governance P&P that every project should have:

1. Code of conduct

2. Contribution process

3. Communication information

Projects that grow larger and more popular, become commercially adopted, or are actively recruiting many new contributors probably want some additional P&P documents, such as:

1. Leadership selection/election process

2. Contributor promotion

3. Release process

4. Security issue reporting and handling

5. Project trademark usage

We’ll talk about these eight documents below.

Developing a code of conduct

Creating a code of conduct (CoC) for your open source community is one of the simplest and most powerful ways to begin influencing the project’s governance model. A code of conduct is a description of expectations for community members' behavior when they act within or on behalf of the project. It might outline the values a community agrees to uphold, articulate the behaviors community members expect one another to exhibit in the service of those values, and identify the consequences of violating the code. The most effective codes of conduct are those written through collaborative processes that involve participants across the community (not just project leadership!). In this way, constructing a code of conduct can become a compelling community-building exercise.

Here are the core items that every Code of Conduct needs to have:

1. A statement of what kind of behavior is encouraged

2. A statement of what kinds of behavior are prohibited

3. Contact information for reporting violations

4. A description of the enforcement mechanism

When you’re starting out, both the report recipients and the enforcers of the CoC are likely to be your project founders. As your project grows, you’ll want to form a specific CoC committee, but you don’t need that right away.

Contribution process

In order to recruit contributors, you need to tell them the basics of how to contribute to your project. For projects on GitHub or GitLab this is generally placed in a document called CONTRIBUTING.md, but it can really go anywhere as long as it’s linked from your project’s home page. If you’ve documented your Contributor role, you can just use that for your contribution docs. If you haven’t, then here’s a few things you should cover in your contribution document:

1. Where to communicate with other contributors.

2. How to submit your first code, documentation, or other contribution.

3. Any testing or formatting requirements, in detail.

4. What to expect from the review process.

5. When they qualify for membership/contributor status.

Some projects have paperwork that needs to be submitted before any contributions can be accepted, such as a Developer Certificate or Origin (DCO) or Contributor License Agreement (CLA), certificate of identity, or GPG keyring. Spell these out with step-by-step instructions in your contribution document.

Communication information

Most open source projects have multiple ways that project members talk to each other, including email, chat, issues, code reviews, video conferencing, and even in-person meetings. You need to spell out which channels your project uses, and how to join them. It’s also important to keep this information up to date.

If you have them, it’s useful to list both your user forums as well as the channels used for contributors, so that people know where to take their questions. Distinguish the media used for official project business as opposed to unofficial channels used for general discussion. It’s extremely frustrating for contributors to be told "oh, we decided that on the mailing list" if they didn’t even know there was a mailing list. Any regular meetings should link to a calendar, or at least information about the next meeting. And if your community has any important events, such as annual developer conference, mention it.

Refer to this guidebook’s chapter on communication norms in open source projects for more detail.

Leadership selection/election process

If you’ve already documented your "leadership" role, the information on how project members become leaders will be part of it. However, some projects don’t get around to writing roles, and other projects have multi-step election procedures that require additional documentation. Some just want a quick-reference of how the election or selection process works.

If you have the typical new small project, this document will be very short indeed, containing simply the list of project leaders, who are also the project founders. If your project has a self-appointing council, it’s not that much more complicated; just write down how the selection works.

Projects that have full-blown elections will need a longer document containing all of the provisions of elections, including who gets to vote, how the vote is conducted and by whom, what the schedule is, and how candidates are selected. We’ll offer additional advice on holding elections at the conclusion of this chapter.

Contributor promotion

If your project has multiple levels of contributor status, with a defined progression between them—what’s known as a "contributor ladder"—then it can be useful to write a specific document explaining how this works. This will give new contributors an idea of what’s ahead of them and what they need to do to move up. It also helps make sure that contributor promotion is being done fairly.

For fairness, it’s preferable to make the promotion rules as objective as possible. For example, "Has consistently helped with code reviews in the subproject" is good, but, "Has completed at least 40 code reviews over the last three months in the subproject" is better. Quantifiable rules help you avoid overlooking contributors who are valuable, but not outspoken.

Smaller projects, with only a couple of contributor levels (e.g., Contributor and Owner), do not need a separate document for this.

Release process

Releasing software involves making decisions around what will and won’t be included in the current release. When a project is small, this is pretty obvious, but in larger projects with contributors working for multiple employers, deciding what stays and what gets cut can be political. Decisions about which platforms are supported can also be contentious. As such, when your project grows you’re going to want to write down some process around releases.

Some projects have defined release teams, in which case this document will be largely a collection of Role documents for the release team. In other projects, the maintainers do the releases, but even with those it’s worthwhile to explain how they decide what gets included. This doesn’t mean necessarily changing how you do releases, but rather just writing down what the real procedure already is, particularly the method of deciding which features and patches get left out. The process for writing and editing the release announcement is also worthwhile, especially if your project involves multiple vendors.

This document will also have lots of non-governance content, like the locations of the servers, the commands to build packages, and how long to wait for mirrors to sync. It’s expected that most of it will be technical instructions. Just don’t neglect the who and why along with the how.

Security issue reporting and handling

Once your project’s code is being used in production by external users, managing security issue reports becomes a critical priority. While this topic could use an entire chapter on its own, there is some basic governance setup associated with handling security issues. This will include:

1. Who is selected to be on the security team, how, and when.

2. Where security reports get sent.

3. How they are handled, including confidentiality requirements.

4. What reciprocation security researchers can expect.

5. How long you can wait before disclosing.

Confidentiality requirements are particularly important for both the security team itself, and for the programmers and security researchers with whom you work. For example, security researchers are willing to not disclose their findings to the public until your project does, but only if they are promised that your security team won’t do that either. In many projects, security team members aren’t allowed to share certain information even with their own employers.

Trademark usage

When a project gets popular, both commercial and non-commercial groups want to use the project’s name, word mark, and graphical logo. Whether it’s just statements of support, a third party wanting to sell shirts with your project on them, or other projects that derive from yours, projects need these entities to be following some kind of official policy around usage. Even if the project has not filed for a trademark with any government yet, establishing a pattern of policy and permission will help protect your project’s name and marks in the future.

Such a policy consists of four things:

1. A general statement of acceptable usage.

2. Contact information to request specific permission or for clarification.

3. A designated team, committee, or contributor who is going to handle these requests.

4. Additional guidelines for the trademark team.

For the actual acceptable usage statement and guidelines, projects should obtain legal assistance. The governance part of this is selecting the "trademark team" (which could be an existing steering council, or similar), and how guidelines are updated and changed. In projects run by multiple technology vendors, it’s critical to work this out in the early stages of the project, because the project’s own sponsors will want to use its mark almost immediately. Make sure that responsibility here is shared between the stakeholders in your project.

Like security issues, the trademark team needs to be able to handle confidential contacts, because sometimes pre-release startups may want to use your project name.

Holding community elections

As community projects grow, many choose to select community representatives. This process may occur when a community loses a founder, a group decides to move to a "ruling technical council" governance model, or when a project moves to a non-profit governing body with paying members.

Regardless of the circumstances, many projects opt to select their community representatives through elections. Historically, choosing a voting system, defining an electorate, and limiting the pool of eligible candidates has proven complicated for community projects.

This section summarizes project election best practices, including who gets to vote, who can be a candidate, and how elections are run.

Electorate and eligible candidate pool

Establishing franchise rules is critical. Some projects have allowed anyone registered for a project’s site to vote in an election—a very low bar—but have specified that only project committers could be election candidates—a high bar. However, almost all projects eventually broaden the pool of potential candidates to equal the pool of voters. Anyone who can vote in the election is therefore eligible to become a candidate.

Projects typically take one of three approaches to defining the electorate and candidate pools:

1. High bar: Voters are members of an inside group—such as committers, maintainers, and core contributors. Membership requires a long history of participation and seniority recognized by peers.

2. Medium bar: Active participants or foundation members can vote, as long as they meet a clearly articulated definition of participation.

3. Low bar: Anyone can vote as long as they complete some basic steps, like signing up to the program or joining the mailing list.

Defining an activity metric and minimum bar specifying what qualifies as "participation" can become contentious, mainly because it involves drawing arbitrary lines delimiting eligible participants. Generally, projects specify that quantified, ongoing participation is necessary to become part of the electorate.

One common election fear is ballot stuffing or cohort effects, where large companies dominate the representative bodies by having a large voting bloc, or where friends of candidates will pass the low bar to become voters simply to vote for their candidate. In most cases, however, such fears are unfounded. Technical communities often try to create rules to mitigate against possible abuses of the system, but in most cases, these rules are "premature optimization," which Donald Knuth, author of The Art of Computer Programming, has famously described as "the root of all evil." [9] Avoiding special rules—and addressing issues with the electoral process as they arise—is generally the better practice.

One final consideration is the process for becoming a candidate in the election. The most popular option is self-nomination, where candidates post election information and their reasons for running. Another option is nomination, which is often the same as self-nomination as the candidate typically asks people to nominate them and second their nomination.

Voting system

Another complex community decision is the voting system. Any community will include people passionate about how to vote—and how to count votes. Without proper care, conversations about these issues can go on for months and result in proposals that are almost impossible to implement.

Most community projects have used:

1. Voting by secret ballot.

2. Online voting, with a personal token to ensure each person may only vote once.

3. Some form of preferential voting, listing candidates in order of preference.

4. Condorcet or single transferable vote (STV) to count the votes and identify winners.

Some projects continue to use alternative voting systems like "first past the post" or weighted voting systems, in which voters receive 12 tokens to allocate to candidates however they wish, and the candidates with the most tokens win the election.

Several projects use online counting software. Options to consider include:

1. Condorcet Internet Voting Service, a free, online voting and Condorcet counting system.

2. OpaVote (formerly OpenSTV), a commercial election counting Software-as-a-Service.

3. OpenSTV, formerly available under the General Public License (GPL) and still used by several projects to count elections.

4. Helios, another free election service that allows online voting and several different vote counting methods.

How to start

If you are planning to propose an election system, begin with a mission statement. For example:

The goal is to ensure the technical steering committee represents everyone contributing actively to the project, valuing non-code contributions equally to code contributions, in the definition of the technical scope and direction of the project.

The mission statement clarifies several things: who is being represented by the elected body, what their authority will be, and why they are being elected. Once you have agreed on the goal of the elected body, choose the simplest ways to define membership in the body being represented. Then, choose the simplest voting and counting system possible.

Community Roles

The roles one takes in an open source community are defined around the ways a role participates, collaborates, and contributes to the community and the various community outputs. It is a common misconception that the only or most valuable way to contribute to an open source project is to write code. There is a saying, "All contributions are of equal value," that sums up the best approach to take.

One part of this is simply not trying to predict the future—you literally cannot know or predict which contribution or contributor is going to have lasting impact on the project. An accumulation of small contributions, for example, can easily have the same impact as a smaller number of large, splashy contributions. Someone might participate in a short user experience workshop and provide a valuable, lasting impact they are not even aware of beyond their brief interaction.

The most important part of why all contributions should have equal weight is that a community is made up of people, and the feelings and experiences of these people literally are community. The things each person brings to the community—their contributions—become a very personal currency in the project, a way of knowing who can be relied upon to do what.

As people grow in their skills over time in a welcoming and inclusive community, whatever the nature of their contributions are, they will have impact far beyond the reach of one person. They are better able to grow to their greatest potential by being allowed to stretch themselves into, then beyond, their roles. One way this "being allowed" manifests is by removing any level of judgement, difference of value, or even shame over different types of contributions.

So it’s a way of recognizing that all people are of equal value in the world, and what they bring each day needs to be weighed as simply the best of a human being in that moment. This is a meaningful way of being inclusive, permitting people to be a 100% contributor regardless of however they are able to participate and behave on any given day.

Ways to Contribute

It’s never too early to think of how you can make a contribution to a project or group you’d like to join. By doing so, you catapult the project further ahead in meeting your needs and the needs of all its users. Furthermore, you can get recognition, improve your skills in a safe environment, and build your network through the people you work with.

This document covers several roles played by contributors. It may be interesting to see how roles are similarly or differently defined by the [CRediT](http://credit.niso.org/) project for academic papers.

Writing documents

Documentation and training materials are crucial to recruitment and to making new members of a group productive. Writing technical documentation is one of the major under-appreciated contributions one can make. As one blogger put it, "Computer documentation has long been like government funding: nobody wants to contribute to it, but everybody wants it to be there when they need it." This section walks you through steps to creating documentation.

Proposing a document

If you notice a hole in the documentation for a project or team, approach the project leaders or ask on the community forum whether anyone is working on documentation for a topic. On a site that allows "issues" such as GitHub and GitLab, you can also request a document by creating an issue, but it’s simpler to start by asking informally whether someone is working on such a document.

If you find someone who is already working on a document you believe necessary, offer to become a reviewer. Sometimes you can even help as an author, but authors must be careful to cleanly and clearly separate the topics assigned to different authors. Documentation tends to be less modular than software.

If no one is working on a document, and the community or project leaders support the creation of a new document, the next question is: who would be the best author? The answer normally is: you. There may be other people with more expertise in the topic, but if they haven’t created the document already, they probably are unable to do so because they are busy, don’t like to write, or for some other reason. The best author is the one with the desire to write the document, and if you proposed it, you are probably that person. Subject matter experts can feed you ideas and review your writing.

At this point, make a formal announcement, such as by creating an issue. A due date is recommended, to provide some pressure to finish the document. Remember that a document needs to be reviewed, which could add several weeks to the project. It is also useful to create milestones, which could include:

1. Start writing

2. Circulate first draft

3. End of review period for first draft

4. Circulate final draft

5. End of review period for final draft

6. Submitted for approval

7. Approved and published

To be accepted into a project, the leadership or advisor group responsible for the project must approve it. These leaders should be liberal in approving documentation projects, because any new document that is relevant to a project will usually prove useful to at least some members.

Becoming an author

After you get approval to write a document from leadership, go through the following steps.

Learn the tools

Find out the preferred format—such as Asciidoc, Markdown, etc.--used by the team. Most projects integrate documents like source code files, so that the project doesn’t have to invent special tools and processes for such tasks as filing bug reports on documents.

Familiarize yourself with related documents

You probably looked at your project’s documentation while researching whether a new document was needed. Before starting to write, you should do searches online and check project documentation for projects similar to yours. Collect links to relevant documents and other materials such as videos that provide background for your readers, or sources of advanced information they can look at after reading your document.

Viewing existing documents written by your project or other projects on similar topics might help you get started. Look for documents written for an audience like yours: developers, end-users, etc.

Criteria for writing

Writing is a skill with many levels of proficiency, but a few guidelines can help inexperienced writers produce a useful document.

- Always think of the people you’re writing for. Defining the audience is the most important part of planning a document, after the topic is chosen. Ask questions such as: will most of my readers know the technical term I’m using? Do end-users need to know the technical details that developers talk about? Do I need to describe how to find a web page or other resource before I talk about using that resource?

- Try to frame directions as procedures divided into small steps. Those are usually the easiest directions to follow, particularly if you lay them out as an order list. Don’t write from memory: always go through the procedure while you write it up. Otherwise, you’re almost certain to forget a step or describe something incorrectly.

- Structure your document. Keep sentences short. Try to break up long paragraphs. Assign new headings frequently. If you find that you’re writing a dozen or more paragraphs in a section and can’t figure out how to break the section into smaller ones, you are probably creating badly organized text that doesn’t flow well.

Writing the document

Usually, the author should circulate an outline for review before writing the document. The outline ensures that all important topics are covered, but that the document won’t contain unnecessary topics. Reviewers can also suggest reorganizations. However, the author often finds reasons to add topics or move them around when turning the outline into the actual document.

References to related documents are an important part of most documents. Authors should do research to find relevant documents, as stated earlier, and include them. Inline links can be useful, particularly to send readers to background in case they have to learn certain basic information to understand your document. However, it’s generally most useful to provide a section of references as the end of the document.

Reviewing documents

Reviews of documents are crowdsourced, meaning that we welcome reviews from a variety of people who differ in knowledge and ability, formal training, race, gender, geographic location, and more. This greatly increases the value and readability of the documents.

You can tell us what you think is incorrect and what is missing. Recognize that we try to keep documents short so that busy people have time to read them. References to good documents and other resources are very valuable.

Editing, proofreading, and spell-checking are also valuable ways to contribute.

Reviewing is a good way to pick up our tone and style in preparation for writing your own documents.

Participating in steering committees

These committees also need leaders. After you participate for a few months, we hope you will consider stepping up into a leadership position. Expertise pertaining to the goals of the group is helpful, but leaders can also help by coordinating people in their tasks, facilitating meetings, and other organizational tasks.

Recruiting other volunteers

A personal appeal from a respected friend or colleague is the most effective way to recruit new team members. When you find a project you support, think of other people who would be valuable additions to the team. After you learn enough about the project to describe its goals and how the team operates, reach out to prospective new members.

General guidance to volunteers

Most volunteers bring useful knowledge into a project, and learn more as they participate. You can share this in many ways: by answering questions on forums and chats, mentoring people, and showing up at group meetings.

Translating software and documentation

What is translation

Translation the software interface and documentation into a different language. The result is a software package that has been localized for people to read the interface and documentation in their preferred language.

What a translator does

Works with tools and processes to translate the software interface, documentation, marketing material, release notes, etc. into one or more languages. Many projects use a common process or model, so learning how to translate in one software project may be a reusable skill in another project. Linux distributions such as Fedora Linux have translators who work on all parts of the operating system, translating it into many dozens of languages.

Why do people like this role

One way many people have contributed to the spreading of open source softwae is by translating the software and documentation into their local language. They use this as a way to bring the benefits of free and open source software to their locale.

Helping administer project systems

What is system administration

Creating and maintaining operational computing systems on behalf of the project. The role skillset may call for a range of sysadmin/operational/DevOps experience, depending on existing systems and what is planned.

What a system administrator does

Works with all aspects of the project on underlying infrastructure. This infrastructure provides the ways to participate and collaborate in the project.

Why people like this role

Learning new skills and working with new technologies. Often people have experience or an inclination to do this work, if not professionally, then as a serious hobby. Especially with modern automation, the role of administrating systems is continuing to change.

Fundraising and organizing sponsorships

What is fundraising

This is the act of finding people and organizations interesting in donating money, hardware, or services to support the project and community. Sponsorship can take many forms. For projects that are not enabled to take in cash donations, sponsorship more often comes in terms of access to events, travel, booth staffing, and so forth.

What a fundraiser does

Works with project leaders, any parent organizations such as foundations, and the people and organizations interested in donating and sponsoring. This involves working through the details of the sponsorship, whether it’s a one-off or part of an ongoing campaign to close aspects of the deal. It may involve further administrating of the sponsorship, funds, grant, or whatever form the donation takes.

Why people like this role

They understand the importance of creating sustainability around open source communities, and want to make a difference. They may have some skills or personality traits that make the effort more interesting or valuable to them individually.

Working aspects of marketing

What is marketing

In open source software, marketing is the act of promoting the community and its software efforts. Other practices, such as market research and advertising, do not typically happen in the community itself.

What a marketer does

Works with different parts of the project to help them ini understanding what their users want and need, then to simplify and amplify those messages out to the world. Feedback from users in open source often goes directly to the development team, in the form of bug reports and user help. Unlike in a closed software development method, the contributors closest to the content and code tend to have a high level of knowledge about the user base. Marketers can help gather, clarify, organize, and prioritize that information into feature sets and roadmaps.

Why people like this role

People who are interested in the modern world of marketing beyond the "it’s all digital" point-of-view can see the aspects of truth, openness, and transparency that are hallmarks of some brands in the world, mirrored in the very processes of open source development.

Helping drive outreach for the project

What is outreach

This is the work involved in connecting with users, participants, and potential contributors, as well as the world in general. These connections are for more than marketing, it may involve aspects of recruiting, user help, feedback gathering, audience analysis, tech support, and so forth.

What a outreach coordinator does

Works directly with creators in the project (code, content, design, marketing, etc.) and acts as a two-way conduit from the project into various forums. The forums might be web-based or mailing lists the project maintains, they may be blogs and tech journalists, they may be websites users go for asking and answering questions. A person doing outreach is knowledgeable to some degree about nearly every aspect of the project, able to identify and establish conections from those parts of the project to the outside world.

Why people like this role

This role involves getting to know people and processes, and communicating about them. It’s an opportunity to be the proxy for people who otherwise might not get heard from in the project, helping to bring those voices to the forefront.

Focusing on community enablement, management, and architecture

What is community architecture et al

With the success of an open source project hinging as much on the community as the code base, most projects have people formally or informally doing the role of designing and helping maintain the community itself as a top priority.

What a community person does

As a core part of their role, this person would be aware of and oversee or directly implement the many best practices in this guidebook. When this role is comprised of multiple people or is only part-time staffed, people involved tend to focus on the practices most germain to the project. In this way a project that is light on community management/enablement resources can still get the key parts done, eventually.

Why people like this role

This role is for people who enjoy communicating, collaborating, and connecting other people. It’s helpful if you get as much joy out of watching other people succeed—while helping celebrate that success, of course—as you do outy out of your own successes. The role is also attractive to people who are interested and skilled at doing a lot of many varied things (a jack-of-all-trades

Other technical roles

The range of possible pieces of software that can be written for one field or another gives some idea of what can fit in here. This can mean specific technical skills, such as a geographer in a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) project. This can be general technical ability, which is often needed for complex problem solving.

Conclusion

This chapter presented a list of some examples of roles that people can fill in open source projects. This list is not comprehensive, but for the roles listed gives an idea of what they do and why people fill them.

Community Manager Self-Care

Disclaimer

Materials in this chapter are for informational purposes only, not for the purpose of providing medical advice. This chapter is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health care provider with any questions or concerns you may have regarding your health, both mental and physical.

Introduction

Because of their roles (but also, perhaps, because of their natures), community managers often focus (even fixate) on the health and well-being of their community members and teams. They understand the challenges and difficulties associated with encouraging stable, safe, and inclusive online communities, places where people demonstrate compassion and empathy. But too often, they mistakenly assume they’re immune to the same emotionally difficult challenges they strive to help other community members overcome.

What’s more, they may even try to hide their vulnerabilities, for fear of being perceived as less capable of performing their roles—or, worse, being rejected by their communities or peer groups completely. This perspective on vulnerability can lead community managers down an isolating road, one that might make them feel as though they aren’t able to reach out to seek help when they need it.

And yet, the longer we don’t attend to our well being, prolonging treatment for our increasingly negative symptoms, the larger the problem—until, eventually, we are mentally and physically debilitated, suffocated, and denied of the fulfillment and joy our role once provided us. Regaining that joy could take months, even years. In fact, we may never regain that same level of passion for the role again.

To help ourselves as community managers, and in turn help others, we need to learn how to spot the signs of dissatistfaction, disillusionment, and burnout. These signs can be subtle and hard to detect, but by identifying and acknowledging these changes in behavior (first and foremost in yourself), you begin applying similar awareness to others in your communities. This experience can provide insight to developing and building up social norms and mechanisms for the community to help reduce the occurrence and impact of burnout, thus promoting a physically and mentally healthy and more productive community.

In this chapter, we’ll explore the importance of self-care and why community managers should be mindful of the interpersonal aspects of the role that may affect them both positively and negatively. This chapter also provides practical steps to encourage and maintain a healthy work life balance that can be applied to themselves and promoted within their community.

The importance of self-care

What exactly is self-care?

The WHO (World Health Organization) defines self-care as:

"Self-care is the ability of individuals, families and communities to promote health, prevent disease, maintain health, and to cope with illness and disability with or without the support of a healthcare provider".[10]

Thus, self-care is the practice of making conscious, mindful efforts to perform activities that aid in our physical, emotional, relational, and perhaps spiritual well-being at a fundamental level. Most of us already practice self-care daily by taking actions to protect our overall health (for example, eating healthy, exercising, and getting enough sleep). Sometimes, however, we may find acts like these alone are insufficient for maintaining our well-being—and that a conscious effort at finding additional support is required.

We can usually handle stress more effectively when we’re in a happy state of mind. By practicing self-care, we can build a resilience to life’s unavoidable stressors.

This concept of self-care may appear simplistic in theory, but it is commonly overlooked or neglected—especially by community managers. Let’s explore (and deconstruct) some reasons why.

Emotional contagion

Community managers are often seen as leaders, the people everyone can turn to, an inspiration for others to emulate. This seemingly high pedestal can be daunting, demanding a good deal of emotional intelligence and mental effort to deliver a community that’s not only growing but also productive.[11]

When the going gets tough, it’s often our responsibility (and our desire) to pull the community through those times. But in order to do this, we need to be in top condition ourselves. That is, we first need to look after ourselves before we can look after others in any sustainable way. Otherwise, we’ll never be able to adequately face whatever is thrown at us—and something always is, when interacting with diverse personalities, resolving conflicts, making tough decisions, all while working towards future long term objectives. And that is why self-care is so important.

One of the first tasks on the road to self-care, then, is to be aware of how our own emotional states can impact our communities.

Emotions (both positive and negative) are highly contagious.[12] Our emotional expressions have the power to unconsciously influence people around us, such that others may even begin unconsciously mimicking our own.[13] If we are in a state of anxiety or stress, others will sense this and add to it with their own negative energy. We see this when dealing with particularly toxic community members infecting others, but fail to identify that we ourselves can unconsciously unduly influence others as well. Similarly, if we are in a genuine pleasant mood, then people tend to be driven by that positive mood and become more productive.

In short: In order to bring out the best in others we must bring our best to the table.

As leaders, we wield potentially immense power to make positive changes in our communities. Let’s use this power. Take every opportunity to utilize your influence for encouraging and promoting self-care—not only for the community’s benefit, but also for yourself. Educate yourself on what self-care looks like to you, and communicate that understanding with your team. Community managers don’t need to share their most intimate fears or anxieties. Yet simply initiating a conversation on the importance of self-care can be beneficial, not just for the team running the community, but for the entire community.

Identify and implement regular, dedicated time in your and the team’s workload to practice self-care. Set realistic expectations on deliverables and communicate frequently within the team the potential triggers of stress or strain that may require more downtime to focus on one’s physical and mental health.

By taking steps towards actively promoting and advocating for self-care, you prompt members following your lead to do the same. You also begin revealing your human side, eroding the unhealthy assumption that leaders are invulnerable to emotional dimensions of the work.

Being (imperfectly and empathetically) human

We can often find ourselves being controlled by unrealistic generalizations (either our own, or others') of what a community manager should be: driven, friendly, successful, super-human, even perfect.

However, these impressions of what a leader really "should" be are full of contradictions and fundamentally flawed. A leader can be many things to many people, but the most important aspect is that they are human: flaws and all.

And yet community managers may tend to over-compensate, attempting to live up to these leadership images—especially by suppressing and hiding negative emotions for fear of being seen as "too emotional" or, worse, "out of control."

But there’s a difference between being in control, being controlled, and being under control.

The belief that "being in control is a reflection of our confidence in what we produce" is inaccurate. It actually demonstrates that we are reluctant to show others that we are not perfect and struggle to accept anything less.[14] Although maintaining this front can help shield us temporarily from others' emotions and criticisms towards us, it doesn’t protect us from our own self-destruction caused by bottling them up.

The consequences of suppressing your emotions will inevitably surface, and dramatically so. This is when our emotions control us (and our actions), which often leads to rumination, collapse of relationships with one’s team or community, and other negative outcomes like burnout.

The ultimate aim is to be "under control," both with your emotions and your workload. Here, our passion and attention are directed in a constructive and purposeful manner—a particularly important place to be in when we’ve made a mistake.

The phrase "bring your whole self to work" is a good expression of allowing yourself this forgiveness. We should feel like we can admit when we don’t know something, haven’t made the correct decision, or have made a mistake. And we should also recognize and accept that we can have good days and bad ones.

Being honest with ourselves is as important as being honest with our communities. If we’re not honest with ourselves and in tune with our emotional states, we may unintentionally escalate difficult situations within our communities (due to our failures at acknowledging that perhaps we should be stepping back until we feel we have more clarity to address the situation appropriately).

Maintaining this kind of emotional labor can be incredibly exhausting. We must acknowledge and accept that being perfect is unattainable, and more importantly, not a requirement for being a great leader. What is important is people can relate to your human side.

People gravitate to others with whom they share a kinship [15], and being able to identify this feeling of kinship is one hallmark of an effective community manager. If your members see that you possess qualities they can relate to, they can more easily empathize with you. Ironically, we often emphasize the significance of practicing empathy for our members or team, but it’s equally important that our members demonstrate compassion and gratitude towards us too.

As everyone on a team or in a community nurtures this empathy, they will gradually deepen connections and trust between them, which in turn can help them establish an informal social support network. This network can be a conduit for promoting the importance of self-care, creating judgment-free zones, or providing safe havens to individual members (including yourself) for emotional reflection, airing frustrations, or sharing workloads.

It is inevitable that some members will expect you to adhere to the pretense of being the all powerful, infallible captain of the ship, but with an effective self-care routine and the backing of the members within this social support network, you’ll feel more confident in your ability to handle those stressors. You’ll also understand that your vulnerabilities are what makes you a better community leader.

Types of self-care

Everyone will prefer different self-care techniques and strategies, depending on their moods and circumstances. To be effective, self-care requires regular and conscious cultivation, so it’s important that we view self-care not only as a reactive choice but also as a means of alleviating the stresses of everyday life.

In general, however, a number of different self-care types can satisfy our basic need to promote a healthy and happy mind and body. These are: physical, mental, spiritual, emotional, and social.

Next, we’ll explore each of these types in more detail. But remember: we should be aiming to practice a selection of activities of all these types if we’re going to provide ourselves a healthy life balance and respond adequately to all types of stress.

Physical self-care

Physical self-care is usually the self-care we perform at a minimum, often subconsciously: feeding, hydrating, sleeping, and exercising.

However, we often find ourselves neglecting these necessities for the sake of work (enduring frequent all-nighters, for example, or forgetting to eat lunch every weekday). Keeping ourselves nourished helps us maintain bodily health. Getting into healthy physical self-care routines also helps us take regular breaks from our work—and our work environments.

Physical self-care might include activities like:

1. Maintaining a regular sleep routine

2. Eating a healthy diet

3. Taking a nap

4. Getting a massage

5. Going for a stroll

6. Stretching

7. Doing yoga (or other forms of exercise)

Mental Self-Care

Mental self-care is the act of stimulating our mind with positive and purposeful thoughts to help reduce stress levels.

These are doing things that keep the mind engage at an intellectual level on topics that interest you or help de-clutter your thoughts to re-organize them.

Mental self-care is often less tangible than other types so it can be more difficult to see an immediate benefit.

However, with consistency of exercising mental self-care we will see it’s benefits shape and form healthy attitudes towards others aspects of our life as we will be more inclined to be mentally satisfied.

A few examples of mental self-care:

1. Reading a new book or article

2. Trying a hobby or interest

3. Writing a list of goals

4. Solving puzzles

5. Organizing or cleaning out a space in your room

Spiritual Self-Care

This type of self-care often gets wrongly associated with being solely about religion but it can be applied to everyone whether you’re religious, atheist, agnostic, or otherwise.

Spiritual self-care are activities that nurtures the connection between you and your soul, providing you a deeper sense of meaning, or understanding of the universe. The word soul is merely a representation of the entity or uniqueness you feel embodies you, this can also be your inner spirit, energy source, or another reference.

A few examples of spiritual self-care:

1. Volunteering for a cause you care about

2. Meditating

3. Spending time in nature

4. Praying or attending religious service

5. Determining your most important values or morals

6. Considering your significant relationships

7. Discovering new forms of spirituality and religion

Regardless of the different types and activities of self-care we perform, the aim is to help us in a constant and sustainable way, to fight off and defend us against the negative effects of our role. By ignoring our physical and mental well being we will be more likely to succumb to the stress and fatigue leading us towards more dangerous chronic illnesses and syndromes, like burnout.

Burnout

What exactly is burnout? The WHO definition of burnout is:

"Burnout is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed."[16]

Burnout can affect us all and in any occupation, however it seems more prevalent in roles that are mentally and emotionally draining for extended periods of time. This is common due to the prevailing norms within those roles of being selfless and putting others first [17]: going the extra mile to maintain a happy and content environment or atmosphere either for the client or within a community.

It is also appearing more and more within the tech industry.[18] This increase has been attributed to the seemly accepted 24/7 work mentality and competitiveness of the industry, leading to workers involved in technology, particularly software development, to becoming overwhelmed and mentally exhausted to the point of risking their health.

We should highlight that work related stress and burnout are very different, and in cases some amount of stress can provide a source of motivation but only if it is manageable and for a temporary period of time. When occupational stress is long occurring, seen as chronic, affecting the overall well being of ourselves, this can develop into what is termed as burnout.

Look out for symptoms

Burnout is extremely hard to detect as not only is it subtle and progressive, but it is often misdiagnosed as the earlier, more temporary, common work related stress. This is because the two are similar until it becomes too late and has developed into a much deeper and harder problem to treat.

Psychologist Herbert Freudenberger has released multiple books and articles since the 1970s regarding his research of the possible causes, implications, and affects of burnout. His work [19] has helped to define the different symptoms and thus the phases of experiencing burnout.

Perhaps you recognize several of them in yourself; perhaps you recognize only one or two. It’s not always easy to see the signs since not only do they gradually occur over time, but also hide behind our own denial of something being wrong.

Exhaustion

Loss of energy and accompanying feelings of weariness are usually the first distress signals especially if you naturally have high energy levels.[20] However, be careful not to push yourself harder if you do find yourself struggling to keep up with your usual round of activities. Doing so will only exacerbate the problem.
Similarly to our emotions, our energy also affects others around us. We tend to fuel our energy by achieving our goals and reaping the rewards, thus sharing that with others. If we are unable to attain rewards due to the lack of energy levels then this feeds into a vicious cycle.

The things that once excited us, like leaving a meeting fired up to accomplish an objective, have now become mundane and seen as an excessive use of our already depleting energy. You may not see the lack of accomplishments, like others do, because you see less and less significance in obtaining the rewards and blame your tiredness on your increasing workload.

Detachment

We usually demonstrate a sense of detachment or apathy as a self-protective device to help ward off emotional stress or pain. When we begin to feel let down by situations or those around us, whether that is the team, community, company, or even ourselves, we are temped to down play their importance; "I don’t care, it wasn’t important anyway," and move away from the things that used to involve us. By doing so we are depriving them the power to affect us negatively, however, this also blocks their ability to positively affect us. This can lead to loneliness and isolation.

Boredom and Cynicism

Once you’ve become more detached from the things that excited you, you find it increasingly hard to remain interested in what’s going on around you. You begin to question the value of your activities, your relationships, and perhaps the bigger aspects of your life. This can lead you to becoming skeptical or even suspicious of other people’s motives and causes.

Impatience and heightened irritability

People who have high energy levels also usually have a characteristic of being mildly impatient, whether it is with others or with themselves, due to their ability to perform things quickly to then progress onto something else. However, when experiencing burnout, the perception becomes that we need to over-accomplish things and thus so does the impatience to do so. This impatience can spill out over to others as irritability with everyone around them. Things that were once trivial and minor become huge obstacles often with the blame pointed at others creating it rather than ourselves.

A sense of omnipotence

We don’t start off feeling this way about our role, but often when we are overwhelmed with our workload we can default to a sentiment: "No one else can do this, only I can."
This sort of statement is often an attempt to justify the over exertion of the effort and applying value to it while other areas of our workload are failing. It’s that grasping for control when things are becoming out of control.

Rest assured that indeed others can perform those tasks, though differently and maybe not to the same degree of excellence you may have done but it could be a situation that doesn’t always require excellence. This type of egoism is more often a hindrance to progression and the initiative of others.

A suspicion of being unappreciated

To counter-balance our lack of energy we often increase our efforts, but this doesn’t necessarily reflect good results. However, we don’t acknowledge this, we only see the effort expended. We can then begin to feel like we’re being less appreciated from others in the team or the community as a whole. "Can’t they see all the hard work I’m doing, staying late at night?" This feeling can lead to being bitter and angry.

Paranoia [21]

Leading from the signs of feeling unappreciated to feeling as though the world is against us. When things go wrong, but we are unable to understand or see why, we tend to seek out a target, not ourselves, to blame regardless if there is little merit in the accusation. Often the person labeled as the culprit becomes the target of our frustrations. This can be team members, friends, or even family.

Disorientation

Disorientation is when we feel we’ve become separated from our environment and understanding of what is going on around us. Discovering yourself in a situation that you didn’t become aware of, or realizing that you previously understood a concept but now do not. We see ourselves starting to forget things easily and our concentration span deteriorates leading us into more confusion and agitation, fueling the other symptoms like paranoia.

Psychosomatic complaints

This is not to be misunderstood to imply those experiencing signs of burnout are not feeling physically sick; they can and do. But it does highlight that with prolonged stress physical illness symptoms appear as a secondary symptom to the cause, like lingering colds, backache, headaches, etc. Sometimes these illnesses mask the deeper more emotional stress that we feel but we feel more comfortable taking a sick day instead of actually acknowledging the mental stress.

Burnout cycle

Freudenberger and his colleague Gail North [22] later categorized the consequences of these symptoms into 12 phases of one developing burnout syndrome [23]. Similar to the symptoms, sufferers may experience episodes in multiple phases, not in sequential order, and for any length of period of time.

1. A compulsion to prove oneself: desire to prove oneself, to have impact on one’s peers, initially seems beneficial until this desire turns into obsession.

2. Intensity (Working Harder): compulsion becomes misconstrued as dedication and commitment. This can appear as an unwillingness to delegate work, for fear of losing perfect control, or working harder and longer.

3. Neglecting their needs: work begins to dominate and subtler duties and pleasures are viewed as unnecessary like sleep, eating healthy, etc.

4. Displacement of conflicts: conflict from others are considered meddlesome and seen as a threat. Coping mechanisms are put into place to dismiss problems and these can manifest into physical breakdowns.

5. Distortion of Values: focus on work only, values are distorted as well as relationships. This leads to them being dismissed or abandoned.

6. Denial of Emerging Problems: mechanisms to defend oneself against the impact of life and in turn their demands. Develop inability to tolerate ambiguity and become non-receptive; projecting the anxieties and insecurities externally.

7. Withdrawal: Become detached from our emotions and from other people. Often "escaping" through television, books, or other means like alcohol/drugs.

8. Odd Behavioral Changes: friends and family identify increasingly obvious changes in behavior like attitude, language, or physical activities.

9. Depersonalization: viewing the needs of one’s self and others are now significantly undervalued and dismissed.

10. Inner Emptiness: feelings of hollowness and uselessness. There is a desire to replenish but are usually just quick wins, or false cures and ultimately unfulfilling.

11. Depression: feeling of being hopeless and joyless. Despair and exhaustion are primary feelings and the overwhelming desire to escape.

12. Burnout Syndrome: suicidal thoughts, physical, and mental collapse leading to life threatening situations. Immediate professional medical help is imperative.

These distinctions help us to identify the deterioration in either our own, our team’s, or community member’s activities and their attitudes towards themselves and others.

It’s important to be self-critical and pierce our disillusion that everything is fine – it usually isn’t and it won’t "just work its way out."

Causes of burnout

We’ve identified the devastating effects of burnout now lets explore the possible sources for these symptoms within our role or even within the community.

We earlier described that burnout is a combination of many factors but a recurring element is the realization, subconsciously or not, that we don’t feel our work is providing us the same sense of reward and purpose as it had once done before.[24] Rewards don’t always equate to money or status but can simply be the deeper satisfaction and pleasure in the adhering to one’s values and achieving happiness.

Lack of Control

To feel a sense of accomplishment and ownership of a task, a role requires a suitable level of autonomy to achieve this. If we have the inability to influence our decisions or don’t have access to appropriate tools or resources, this can lead to the de-motivating feeling that our work and effort is not being appreciated enough or we are not trusted enough with this responsibility.
Lack of control can also manifest when dealing with other peoples' emotions. Although we can encourage and try to direct our members to adhere to our community’s code of conduct or a preferred course of action in a conflict, we evidently cannot remove their willfulness. We must only pre-empt their next move no matter how disastrous it may be. This can lead to the feeling of being constantly in firefighting-mode and not accomplishing anything.

Unfairness

Unfairness within the role can be viewed as a number of different things that attribute to feeling powerless or being disrespected. Either you or others are treated unfairly, such as: office or community politics that create a culture of favoritism, lack of transparency in the top-down decisions, or a disproportionate amount of workload is allocated to you.

Insufficient Reward

You feel unappreciated, taken for granted or simply not satisfied in your role. Rewards don’t always need to be monetary but often this is the first thing to come under our scrutiny when the workload increases.
We also need social rewards where we gain the recognition from others. A lack of recognition can be from the company itself not appreciating our worth, the team’s lack of respect towards us, or from the community not seeing all the "behind the scenes" activities we perform.

Intrinsic rewards are also important to maintain a healthy perception of our role. This is where you take the self-acknowledgment of doing a good job and feel accomplished. When we feel we aren’t living up to our standards we begin to feel disappointed and become de-motivated.

Sometimes we feel unsatisfied because we have a conflict of personal values with the company or project we work with. We are often asked to relay and even promote the decisions of the company to the community and these may not align with our own personal values. This can be seen as self-betrayal to our morals and build up resentment towards the company.

Work Overload

Probably the most common experience contributing to burnout is the over-burdening of one’s workload [25], whether from our own doing or by someone else. This can occur when the quantity of work and expectations exceeds the amount of time or resources available. We may feel that most other employees expect work assigned to us is "urgent", when in fact it may not be. It’s important to maintain boundaries and stand your ground to resist an ever increasing list of things to do.

Lack of Community

It goes without saying that community is extremely important; it fuels the purpose of the role as a source of motivation and companionship—a sense of belonging to you as a person. However, if this becomes stagnant, overwhelmed with toxic members, and feedback is non-existent, this can make the job feel stifled.

Preventing/treating burnout

If you feel yourself or anyone else succumbing to burnout then the most direct approach is to take a break from the source of the stress, which is more often work itself, and reflect on the more acute causes of your burnout.[26]

Use your holiday time

Don’t be afraid to utilize this time and don’t feel guilty either. Using your holiday does not demerit your dedication to the role, neither does it mean that everything will fall apart while away. Use this time to concentrate on yourself, and what gives you pleasure in life.

Spend time with those you care about

Re-kindle your social relationships, they have probably missed you as a result of the developing burnout. Talk through how you’re feeling and enjoy your time with them so it is overall a pleasant experience.
Try to generally stay clear of negative people in your life. This could mean letting them disappear from your social network, or limit your interaction with them. Remember, other people’s emotions can affect us both positive and negatively.

Re-evaluate priorities

Identify what is important to you and reflect upon if your current lifestyle, or work life balance mirrors that. If they don’t, then prioritize what you wish to enjoy more, block out time in your schedule, and commit to it.
Also evaluate your options and consider what the next steps would be to resolve the stressors you have. This could be coming to a solution or compromises with your line manager to reduce workload or other concerns you have. There may be a point that the only way to remove certain stressors in your life is to leave your job to improve your health.

Practice self-care

Take the time to commit yourself fully to what ever self-care activity you want to enjoy and do it. Try and practice self-care daily, detaching yourself from as much work as possible and devote yourself to some "me" time.

Seek professional help

If all the other options have little or no affect on your physical or mental well being, or you feel you require immediate assistance, then do seek professional help as a matter of urgency.

Work-life balance

A healthy work-life balance is having a clear distinction between our personal and work lives without allowing one to dominate the other. Both are equally important and neither should be undervalued. We can find ourselves in unhealthy mindsets when forced to be stuck in either one extreme or the other, withholding an important sense of purpose and enjoyment from that part of our lives.

It has also become more difficult in this day and age to detach ourselves physically from our work life. Technology has provided us such a convenience that we are in almost constant connection to it, and thus in connection to our online communities. It is a common place to check emails at all hours, or respond to members of communities on our social media network.

As well as this physical difficulty we may also have the emotional difficulty of switching off from work. We can feel it’s a requirement of our role to be available 24/7 and be responsive as a reflection of a caring and active community. This is often not the case, and in fact is counter productive in building a sustainable community and providing quality interactions with our members. Leaders don’t need to respond to all messages to be great.

Each person’s work life balance is different with each their own prioritizes. This is where self-care activities play a big part in establishing the distinction between work and personal life. Make a clear differentiation of what you view as work, like answering community requests or emails, arranging calls or meetings, etc. and the hours you aim to dedicate to work; anything outside of that communicate to yourself and to others that is your personal time. By dedicating a consistent and explicit downtime, we begin to develop a habit that our body and mind anticipates and begins to look forward to, making it easier to develop and maintain a good habit.

Addiction

Work addiction, often referred to as workaholism, can affect anyone who is deeply embedded in an online community and often justifies their extensive work hours as commitment to the project. The inability to stop is often driven by the compulsive need to achieve status and success, or in some cases to escape emotional stress. Work addiction can be a vicious cycle where the feeling of achievement is an addictive "high" at the cost of our mental and physical well being, often not noticed until too late.

Work addiction, like other addictions, is difficult to acknowledge there is a problem to begin with. People suffering from work addiction are often in denial, convincing themselves work is a pleasure. Eventually this over compensation of effort and time, neglect of personal relationships and well being, leads to the inevitable experience of burnout.

It’s important we develop a healthy relationship with our role itself without feeling the need to be on the pedal at full gas. Try and assess what truly drives your motivations to achieve and does this require you to be online the amount of time you are. Do you find that you feed off external praise as form of validation of your work? Do feel that if you walked away from the community it would fall apart? Identify those moments of pleasure, whether it’s completing a task, or receiving a compliment from a community member or boss, and evaluate whether they are needed in the same doses you are currently experiencing them at.

We can also find that this need to achieve is a reaction to a heavy workload from the lack of resources within the team trying to prove to others the value the role and team brings to the project or company.

Reconsider these goals with the aim to reduce your workload. Are they achievable and maintainable with the current resources without sacrificing quality and a good work-life balance? If they aren’t, then consider prioritizing and communicating the most impactful goals that the team can achieve. Delegate any other tasks to suitable members or establish more flexible timelines, and anticipate time for possible firefighting as part of those deadlines.

Not only does this help to set reasonable expectations for the team members to achieve, but also promotes that a healthy work-life balance is an integral part of their schedule. This predictable schedule also helps you to provide better forecasting to the company or community.

Maintain boundaries

When reflecting upon our work-life balance, it is important to establish clear boundaries between the two. As we’ve said earlier, due to our nature of work, we find ourselves participating within the community, and this begins to eat into our personal time, leaving nothing else. This is tolerable only on a temporary basis and only when we are required for an intervention, but this should not be the norm. Boundaries help us establish where our work ends, and pleasure begins. We’re not saying that work isn’t pleasurable, but having a variety of activities other than work helps stimulate our minds and provide alternative creative outlets.

These boundaries can also help the community acknowledge and accept your expectations of them as well of what they can expect from you. Be as transparent as possible by defining your available hours, and an escalation process for obtaining help outside of those hours. Highlight the importance of documenting community processes so members feel more informed on what they should do in incidences, with or without requiring assistance. The aim is to establish a consistent schedule, and to have the team and community respect it. Although they may not do so on every occasion, you will be able to use your boundaries to help prevent the feeling of guilt as you begin to embrace personal time as your own, as well as respecting others.

Of course if there are any serious incidences that require your intervention during down-time, ensure you put into place mechanisms for the team to handle them rather than you being the only one who ‘can handle it.' These mechanisms can be an escalation process or a team effort to respond and review the response collectively. This helps encourages the mentality that everyone can lighten the load, especially when it eats into yours and their personal time.

Maintaining personal boundaries is also extremely important as well. Our role often asks us to help members with their workload as well as interpersonal communication matters between themselves and other team members. But we need to be aware and recognize that we can’t solve every interpersonal issue or conflict–sometimes we just can’t become too involved.

As much as we don’t want to admit it, we must respect that we are not skilled or obligated to practice therapy if we feel it is required for a particular member. When the conversations or observations become more apparent in that direction, then aim to persuade them to seek medical or psychiatric help. Our role is to aid members, but there is only so much we can achieve from our position and that is OK.

It can be beneficial to partake in mental health training for you and your team to learn how to handle situations involving members in the community or team. This can help you apply a suitable process to follow upon if someone is beyond your ability and responsibility to help them.

Sustainability

Sustainability is an extremely important goal to have for a community, often seen as a contributing factor to the project’s own success. This should always be at the forefront of our minds when developing tools and processes for the community, with the aim for the community to become self-reliant, self-driven, and empowered. But there is a lot of work to be done to achieve this, and we need to ensure we and our team are able to keep up.

Things become unsustainable when we have set unrealistic expectations either upon ourselves or on the community. When it comes to ourselves we can underestimate our project timelines because we have attributed our motivation as part of the estimation: the drive that will get us over the last hurdle. Motivation is not an unlimited supply, and can fluctuate drastically due to external and internal factors. Try to extract motivation as a factor—although you may feel extremely excited about a project, don’t let that cloud your judgment on how long a project will take to complete. If not, you may see it negatively affecting your work life balance.

We tend to also inaccurately assume the motivation of others in the community. By definition community member are volunteers and, yes, we are fortunate to have those exceptional members that go above and beyond what is required. However, we should not expect the same of all, in fact we should expect delays and anticipate them.

By beginning to form clear boundaries, reduce your workload expectations, and improve estimations, you start to deliver on realistic schedules. Imagine you achieve a task within a week, rather than it taking triple that amount of time, because: you identified it as a priority; delegated other lower tasks to the team (or set the expectation it wouldn’t done at all); only worked within your allocated time; and were refreshed from recharging your mental well being with dedicated offline time. This combination of activities and processes was key to achieving success, thus triggering the event of providing and receiving continuous rewards, and helping towards reducing the probability of members developing burnout.

The only thing that is ever consistent is time, so be aware that you may find the same rewards you gave yourself and others, change over time. Take time out to frequently reflect on what drives you and your community, positively review how much you have progressed, and assess what resources you have to adjust project goals accordingly without interfering, if possible, with a healthy work life balance.

Self-reflection

Through the looking glass

An important aspect of being a manager or leader is to provide good and constructive feedback to those that are on our team, as well as the community as a whole. We understand that feedback from upper line managers/other leaders and those that report directly to us is extremely important to understand their perception of us as a person and our activities representing them: if they truly reflect our efforts.

Retrospectives are now almost integral in software development teams to continuously improve individual or team performance and morale, and identify problems that need solving. However, we find we don’t often do a retrospective for ourselves, with ourselves.

Introspection is the examination of one’s own conscious thoughts and feelings. This can refer to the mental state or in a spiritual sense, one’s soul. Self-reflection, introspection, and self-care are all intertwined with the aim to promote and sustain a positive direction for mental growth and development.

Introspection is extremely important for ourselves to evaluate our purpose and happiness we get from our actions, thoughts, and behavior. Since work is a big part of our lives, we want to ensure our role within the community and at our company aligns with our values. Or else we will find ourselves becoming more and more dissatisfied by the role’s insufficient rewards.

But first we need to know what our values are, what qualities we enjoy out of the role, and the characteristics of the people we love to work with.

Take some time to truly answer these, as gaining this self-awareness does not happen over night. Use these answers to help you reflect on how you feel when you do the things you do, both positively and negatively. Journaling is often a good, yet simple, practice you can do to clarify your thoughts.

Practicing self-reflection can be difficult to begin with due to previously discussed inner restrictions we place upon ourselves as community leaders: the need of being invincible; distorted perception of our worth; and lack of visible support. However, in creating a routine of introspection and self-reflection as part of our self-care, we will begin to exercise more control over our emotions: have inner clarity on our long term goals, and ability to identify more solutions-focused activities rather than the previously emotionally driven ones.

Tackling imposter syndrome

This term was first defined by psychologists Dr Pauline Clance and Dr Suzanne Imes [27] in the 1970s as the internal experience one feels, despite overwhelming amount of evidence proving otherwise, that they are incompetent and that their success was a product of luck or fraud within their field of expertise.

Often those that experience impostor syndrome have a hard time internalizing and accepting their success by minimizing positive feedback and comparing other’s work to their own. This more frequently happens if we have started a new job, taken on new responsibilities or roles, or returned from a recent career break. In order to compensate for this chronic self-doubt we begin to work late, procrastinate, or try to justify our position in unnecessary ways.

Dr Valerie Young [28] further categorized these types of flawed thinking of what sufferers believe it takes to be competent into the following subgroups:

Perfectionist

Perfectionism and imposter syndrome tend to go hand in hand. When a perfectionist doesn’t achieve their unreasonable high standards they question their abilities and thus if they deserve to be in the position they are in. If they do successfully achieve their goal, there always seems to be that unattainable objective they expected to have reached or knowledge they expected to have but didn’t.

Natural Genius

These sufferers feel that the natural ability to achieve a task is a direct correlation to their competence. If they take a long time to master something they feel that it has less merit. Not only do they have high standards but they also have to complete it without breaking too much of a sweat.

Soloist

These are those that shy away from asking for help because they fear that would expose them for who they believe others to see them as – a fraud. Although being independent is good, it can lead to sub par results without acknowledging that two heads are often better than one.

Expert

People with this complex of impostor syndrome often dismiss their success because they don’t know everything there is to know about the topic or role. Often these people dislike to be put on the spot in case there is some aspect they were unaware of and thus exposed as a fraud.

Superhuman

Usually these people often over compare themselves to others in their industry, the seemly high achievers, and push themselves to work harder and longer to measure up to them. They also tend to heavily rely on external validation.

Since our role as community managers is relatively new and less established than other roles within the tech industry, we can find ourselves struggling to easily define and confirm our decisions due to the lack of expertise and documentation in this field. We can find ourselves feeling more aware of being identified as a fraud especially when the company or project has never had a community manager before.

However, there are ways to help keep impostor syndrome in check and increase your self confidence.

Celebrate Successes

Frequently write down our successes and enjoy them. Journaling is a good way to have comparisons from earlier successes and how they lead up to our current ones. Include our own account of successes but better yet include testimonials from others, be it from community members responding to our thread posts, or colleagues praising our work. This will help support that feeling that we are contributing value in our role and others confirmed it.

"We don’t attach to people or things, we attach to uninvestigated concepts that we believe to be true in the moment"

— Byron Katie

Change your perspective

We are hindered by our fear of being exposed as a fraud, but usually we don’t have the proof that confirms that is the case. We often wrongly assume and interpret actions of others as a direct cause and effect to things we have done or said. This is because we are viewing the situation from our perspective and only from ours.
Concentrate on what value your work brings to the subject or community and visualize that success. Imagining good things happening can give you the confidence, and motivation, to commit to the task at hand and overcome the fear.

Working in progress

We are always learning, improving, and progressing. Treat our successes as continuously developing projects, adding refinements into each iteration. Not only will we be able to record multiple successes but also help acknowledge that perfectionism is impossible and mistakes are opportunities for better learning.

Network of support

We understand the power of a community, the ability to bring people together and with the right directions—and a whole lot of love—we can move mountains. So why do we feel we can’t have the same mentality toward helping ourselves?

During stressful and tough times, whether it’s just a bad day, or more chronic episodes of illness, research has shown that having a strong—though not required to be large—social support network is beneficial to our well being [29] Without a social support network it can feel lonely and isolating which can lead into further depression and anxiety.[30] Often it’s our social support network, even if we don’t think we have one, that first spots there is a change with our behavior before we do.

A social support network is made up of friends, family, and peers.[31] Although this is different from a support group, which is more formal and often prescribed, a social support network is something we can develop as part of our community and team structure to help tackle stress, and promote self-care.

Look towards those around you who you have a good relationship with and you feel you can confide in them. When you are feeling stressed or want to simply vent your frustrations, come to rely on your social support network to let go in a safe and healthy way. This unburdening of tension helps untangle your emotions, seek clarity on an aspect of decision making, or just lightens your mood by the sheer enjoyment of speaking with them.

We may find that those within the community, whom we spend most of our time with, grow to be included in our social support network and that each individual provides us with a unique form of support to help in different ways in our lives. But also remember that we should also serve as a form of support to others.

The more education and communicating with our members about the benefits of self-care, the more likely we will see it being practiced and encouraged by others. This in turns helps create a more caring and accepting atmosphere in the community. Education can be in the form of discussions promoting self-care, celebrating mental health campaigns [32], adding to the community guidelines when on-boarding team members to speak to the team if their workload or other aspects is affecting their health [33][34], or organizing training for team members on mental health awareness.

If you see a member on the team or community showing symptoms of burnout then reach out to them and let them know you are concerned for their well being. Identify that you are there to support them and more often they will respond positively and work together to alleviate their stress.[35]

However, it is important to make clear here that if we feel that we are unable to assist a community member’s emotional stress beyond our role’s capacity, then encourage that they seek professional health advice immediately. We may find ourselves feeling guilty we are unable to provide support, but we need to remind ourselves that we are not professionally trained and thus could provide—though well intended—ill advice.[36] Remember that other emotions affect those around them including how member’s stress can affect ours.

Similarly in our own direct reports' one-to-ones ensure you also have regular one-to-ones with your line manager to highlight any problems you have achieving your workload or effecting your well being. Be as direct as you are with helping others, as you are with yourself.

Resources

- High-Octane Women: How Superachievers Can Avoid Burnout
by Sherrie Bourg Carter Psy.D

- Burnout, Your first ten steps
by Amy Imms M.D

- Burn-out : The High Cost of High Achievement
by Dr Herbert Freudenberger and Geraldine Richelson

- Women’s Burnout: How to Spot It, How to Reverse It, and How to Prevent It
by Dr Herbert Freudenberger and Dr Gail North

- The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women
by Dr Valerie Young

- The imposter phenomenon in high achieving women: Dynamics and therapeutic intervention.
by Dr Pauline Clance and Dr Suzanne Imes

[9] Knuth, Donald E, The Art of Computer Programming. Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley Pub. Co, 1968. Print.

[10] World Health Organization, website

[11] The Community Roundtable, 2019 State of Community Management Survey

[12] Sherrie Bourg Carter Psy.D, Emotions Are Contagious - Choose Your Company Wisely

[13] Principles of Social Psychology, The Role of Affect: Moods and Emotions

[14] Alex Budak, In-Control vs. Under-Control Leadership

[15] Psychology Today , Why Do We Like People Who Are Similar to Us?

[16] World Health Organization, website

[17] Herbert J. Freudenberger, Staff Burn-Out

[18] Team Blind, Close to 60 Percent of Surveyed Tech Workers Are Burnt Out…

[19] Dr Herbert Freudenberger and Geraldine Richelson, "Burn-out : The High Cost of High Achievement"

[20] Maslach, C., & Leiter, M. P. (2008), Early predictors of job burnout and engagement. Journal of Applied Psychology, 93(3), 498–512

[21] R Bianchi, L Janin Burnout, depression and paranoid ideation: a cluster-analytic study

[22] Dr Herbert Freudenberger and Dr Gail North, "Women’s Burnout: How to Spot It, How to Reverse It, and How to Prevent It"

[23] Freudenberger’s 12 stages, Freudenberger’s 12 stages

[24] Adeva What causes employee burnout in the tech industry

[25] The American Institute of Stress: Survey, The AIS Workplace Stress Survey

[26] Pyschology Today, When Life Loses Its Meaning: The Heavy Price of High Achievement

[27] Dr Pauline Clance and Dr Suzanne Imes, "The imposter phenomenon in high achieving women: Dynamics and therapeutic intervention."

[28] Dr Valerie Young, "The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women"

[29] American Pyschological Association, Manage stress: Strengthen your support network

[30] Siv Grav, Ove Hellzèn, Ulla Romild, Eystein Stordal, Association between social support and depression in the general population: the HUNT study, a cross‐sectional survey

[31] Mayo Clinic, Social support: Tap this tool to beat stress

[32] Mental Health Foundation Mental Health Awareness Week

[33] Ubuntu Ubuntu Burnout

[34] Ubuntu Burnout Help, Ubuntu Burnout Help

[35] Jono Bacon, Detecting and Treating Burnout, "The Art of Community"

[36] Chartered Management Institute How to Talk About Depression at Work

Measuring Success

In the days before open source, measuring the success of a software effort was often defined in strictly financial terms. How many boxes—yes, boxes—of software did a company sell? That revenue was offset by the cost of support, authoring, and distribution (again, boxes), and voila! The profit was the measure of success.

In the open source world, it doesn’t quite work like that. For one thing, while there are commercially successful open source projects, the success of those projects is still not strictly tied to just the financials. Nor is success set against the common benchmark of downloads. It is very easy to presume, for instance, that if a software project has millions of downloads, it is doing very well. But just because users are consuming the software steadily does not mean there aren’t internal problems in the project’s community. There could be any number of factors set to bring the project to a halt. Conversely, there are many very successful projects that don’t have the headlines and the huge popularity.

So, if money and fame are not the success factors in open source software projects, what are?

For open source projects, success is not just measured in terms of commercial or consumptive success. Free and open source projects have become much more transparently developed thanks to the popularity of distributed version control and collaboration tools. While these tools, such as the ones based on git, have certainly given contributors a big advantage in putting projects together, another benefit is that they also allow a much more robust and quantitative observation of how projects are doing.

In the past, it was difficult to see in real time if the processes of a given project were successful or not. You would see the output of a project’s efforts, but not the steps the process took along the way to get there. At least, not without a lot of effort. So establishing a project’s health and success was done more with subjective methods, often based on sociological and business-oriented principles that have become ingrained in many cultures. Now, though, you can easily dive into the data shown by open development, and use that data to derive quantitative information about a project’s health. It is these concepts that this section explores.

This section contains chapters that:

- Discuss the formation of healthy, participatory communities.

- Examine how metrics can be applied to projects.

- Determine which metrics will be the most useful for a project.

- Highlight ways to increase participation in a project’s announcements.

This section is useful for you if:

- You want to know if your community is healthy.

- You are seeking data that can demonstrate successes and failures.

- You need more contributors in your project.

- You have read this far, why stop now?

Defining Healthy Communities

Introduction

While we know that no one wants to live and work in an unhealthy community, we also know that it’s complex to define and maintain health. First you have to know what you consider to be a healthy situation and set of behaviors. Then you have to check (test) those situations and behaviors over time so you can dynamically predict and respond to maintain health.

What is healthy may change it’s definition over time, as your community evolves. Early on you are going to be putting a lot of effort into having a healthy community for users, especially around how you take in and manage feedback. As you evolve into or grow as a contributor project, the definitions of healthy and how to maintain become exponentially complex.

However, once you have decided that having a contributor-based open source software community is your goal, you can be aware of and focus on the entirety from the beginning. A project that understands and is healthy at the contributor level, is naturally going to express that health into the other layers of participation and for end users. That is, healthy contributors are involved in creating safe and healthy environments for others as a direct focus and/or side effect of the work they do in being healthy.

As an example, let’s presume that kindness is a behavior you consider to be healthy for contributors to have between each other. Kindness toward immediate peers is one way to conduct this behavior. But in open source we can see that extending kindness to each person who enters the project’s sphere not only gives them a good experience, it means they extend that kindness into how they interact in the rest project. If your kindess can turn ten users into being more kind toward your fellow contributors, you have magnified that kindness beyond what you can give that peer directly.

Defining healthy communities

There are two main ways we consider when viewing the health of an open source community.

Because attracting users is a key to success, we look at how the world sees the project. These are the signs people look for when they see a project, from activity levels to maintainer interactions.

Because attracting and maintaining participants and contributors is a key of existence, we look at how a project considers its own health.

How the world sees the project

Later in this chapter we look at how to conduct an audit that measures the health of this aspect of a project. In that audit, you’ll see the main top-line questions from here as categories for more in-depth questions. Those questions in the audit section go into further details of the category.

Structure

This is the structure of things people see and perceive as they visit your project. If it were a building, it would be the number of floors, can you walk in the front door, is it accessible to wheelchairs and baby-strollers, is there a clear sign with the street address, is there a directory in the lobby so you know where to go, is the lobby well-lit and safe looking, and so forth.

- Does the project have a website with a unique/memorable name?

- Does the website have the elements needed for an open source project?

- Does the website make clear the project’s purpose, how to get and use its software, and so forth?

- Does the project have a Code of Conduct?

- Does the project have a diversity and inclusion effort?

- Does the project put its diversity and inclusion efforts up front?

Release Management

What is the project’s discipline and process around releasing software for end users?

- Does the project release software?

- Has it done a release?

- What other types of artifacts are released?

- What type of development cycle/model are they striving for?

Activity

How active is the development of code and content for the project? This requires looking at the project’s code and content repositories.

- What are the release activity data?

- What is the commits activity?

- What is the bug reports activity?

- What is the events and meeting activity?

- What is the mailing lists activity?

- What are the communication channels the project uses, in what priority?

Documentation

This is content useful to a range of people, including end users, developers using or integrating the software, and contributors to the project.

- What is the overall quality of the documentation?

- How is documentation created?

- Who creates the documentation?

Code Quality

This is a health area that has been evolving. From when this guidebook first looked at code quality in the 1.0 version to now, there has been a large growth of languages, development enviroments, and schools of thought about how to solve common problems. This category is the most subjective in this chapter.

- What is the overall quality of the code?

Outreach

From attracting users, through exciting participation, to connecting people for collaboration, the way a project reaches out to the world is an important aspect of project health.

- What are the downloads data?

- What are the blogs data?

- What are the social media data?

- What are the events data?

- What are the communication data?

License

This is a binary situation: does the project have an Open Source Initiative approved license, or not?

- What kind of license does the project have?

How the project sees and understands itself

This is a highly subject mix, and as a project ourselves, the authors of this guidebook are still exploring this material. For this chapter, we offer a list of considerations that seem generally applicable.

- How is diversity from all angles

- How is organizational diversity alongside other, more important groups?

- This is a non-special awareness particular to open source software: projects dominated by a single organization/company are limiting their potential in not being organizationally diverse. That is, the value that diversity brings also applies to having people from diverse organizations.

- What is the sense of psychological safety? Overall and within teams?

- Is it clear how to progress in the project toward more responsibility, leadership, and influence? (This is all the governance/merit stuff as it actually works day-to-day.)

- How hard is it to DO something?

- What is the level of automation? Is this level from technical debt, job security, something else?

- What is the level of cookie licking going on? (This is when known contributors, by speaking up or being present, are presumed by others to own the problem/situation/whatever.)

- How are things going with cliques? Cliques are a natural social mechanism, which arise in open source communities, and can be a source of joy and fun and productivity, as well as sorrow and angst and feeling left out.

- Rules aren’t always followed; what is the percentage and feeling of the project following its own guidelines? What are the types of rules less followed and more followed?

- Is there a sense across the project of a healthy work/life balance?

- Is there a culture of mentorship?

- How is the process and pain and results around self-documentation?

- Do the kids have shoes? Does the roof leak?

- What are the broken stairs? A broken stair is a term for something dysfunctional in a community, which everyone learns to just work around rather than talk about it and get it fixed.

- How is the sympatico, the interpersonal relationship quality between individuals?

Building healthy communities

The actual process and experience of building out an open source community is particular to each situation. That is, it’s not unique in it’s parts, but it is unique in it’s composition. This means you can take various truisms (best practices) and apply them to your particular situation, even though your situation will never resemble a step-by-step process.

Following are elements that allow the building and growth of healthy communites.

Communities require care, feeding, and weeding to get started

Imagine if you grow a garden and are very ambitious. The first year you overplant and are unwilling to thin out the seedlings. You end up with overcrowded, unhealthy plants.

In online communities (including open source communities), there is a strong drive for immediate and explosive growth. This is usually achieved by promoting the project in as many environments as are appropriate, with the result that many people join the community out of casual interest. There’s often a strong impulse to accept early adopters as committers, to create the impression of a viable, strong team.

Contributing community members—those who affect the actual direction of the project—should be chosen based on how much they actually contribute, and the value of their contributions, and overall consensus. If someone contributes fixes to a number of critical bugs, perhaps they should get write access for the project (and a corresponding voice); if, however, that same person creates a poisonous atmosphere for the community, then promotion to maintainer is not a good idea.

It’s also worthwhile to take note of core community members, rewarding those who contribute regardless of coding ability. For example, consider someone who is great at helping new users but hasn’t tried to fix bugs—recognizing those contributions creates a positive impression for that user and everyone else. Positive motivation encourages others to do what garnered the reward, which in turn makes the entire community more strong.

Growth should always be encouraged, by the entire community; just try to assure that the growth is composed of candidates who’ve earned membership. This does not mean that everyone has to get along perfectly at all times; personality conflicts are certainly possible (and likely, in some cases). However, the community at large shouldn’t allow specific members' opinions to make primary decisions like this; seek consensus rather than responding to the urging of a small subset.

Of course, a member’s actions might be severe enough to warrant a response. Use reason; consider whether anyone would be caught by surprise if an action is taken.

Embrace failure

Fail spectacularly, and don’t forget to take notes.

There is a lot of crowd wisdom at work here. It’s basic physics, too — if you charge ahead and fall on your face, you at least made headway. Like feeling your way around in the dark, each touch, bump, and stub of the toe teaches you more about the environment.

When you drive your processes and technology to the brink of failure, repeatedly, you get very comfortable somewhere most people don’t even want to go. You also get to set a new standard for what is comfortable for your community, giving you new room to expand even further.

Culture of transparency

One of the most important elements of an open source community is the level and quality of transparency. Humans need private space, for certain, and that supports our ability to conduct ourselves in public space. Ultimately, all discussions and decisions need to held in front of the entire community. This builds trust, handles objections by including feedback as solutions along the way, and builds toward a community acting as a chorus. Key parts of this element include:

Take extra extra extra care to have all discussions in the open

Even if it means stopping and restarting a conversation in a public/archived location, keep this in mind at all times.
If it’s not in the public record, then it doesn’t exist.

This means that when you have private discussions, and such hallway conversations do happen, the responsibility is on the participants to record as best as possible the conversation — notes taken in the middle and at the end can suffice as such documentation. The results of this discussion, minus privately sensitive matters, must be sent to the main openly archived discussion area, such as the community mailing list.

Remember that such discussions are not where decisions are made. You can decide on a recommendation, but that must be made to the larger body and openly decided with all able to participate.

Trust but verify. A commitment to participatory transparency invests into the mutually held bank of trust. "Just trust us" decisions done behind closed doors spend from the bank of trust. The bank can go broke all too easily.

Radically visible meetings at all times

Any private interactions, from the hallway to email/irc to phone calls, are a risk to the project. At the minimum, you must be mindful of reporting back the results of direct conversation.
However, this isn’t really good enough. A summary of a meeting never shows the reasoned discussion, effectively cutting the community out of the decision making process.

There is a reason forums, mailing lists, open chat networks, and repo comments and logs are the baseline for all communication in successful open source projects.

No decision point is too small to pre-announce to a mailing list

While we can grow trust in the community about technical or other decisions, there are common problem circumstances we can avoid.
The corporate sponsor and staff are always more suspect, so need to take extra care to share the decision making process.

We cannot guess what is important to contributors, nor why. Presuming they don’t care about a decision is a bad idea.

The method is to take all decisions to the open forums, until people start complaining that a particular class of decisions can happen in another way/place. This is called, "Building trust by proof through annoying transparency."

It’s okay to be disappointed but never okay to be surprised

No one is going to like every decision made, and people will be disappointed. That is a fact of life we cannot avoid.
However, no one should ever be surprised, especially by something perceived as negative. It is a morale killer and eventually drives people away.

Sometimes we hold back on letting people know information because we are concerned they’ll be disappointed. When mishandled, those folks end up disappointed and surprised, which is a potently negative combination.

You may need to inform people in a private communication channel, and should do so often where there is a chance they may not know or could not know a decision.

If you find people being surprised too often, do a serious review of your communication methods. For some reason, you are not reaching enough of the people for word to spread.

Don’t bury decisions in other text that people don’t read. As with a software patch, people can understand changes better when they arrive in discrete chunks to the community commons, such as a mailing list or blog planet. You may need to split decisions or discussion points out to individual threads so people can see the various trees as well as the forest.

If you find a decision or detail is buried in a discussion and people might miss it, find a way to highlight it so that people are not surprised later.

Take even more care to do all design decisions in the open

Even when all content is done using open resources, if you make design decisions via in-person meetings, hallway discussions, over lunch, during the daily commute, and so forth, then you are leaving the community out of work that really matters. They’ll notice and care.
People talk with each other, and that’s fine. Just consider it to be pre-decision discussions and follow these rules:

- A decision doesn’t exist unless it’s discussed in the common forums first.

- A conclusion isn’t justified unless the discussion demonstrating it and evidence backing it up are visible publicly.

- A discussion doesn’t exist unless it’s on the community forum—send at least a summary of all non-public discussions to the mailing list, with the conclusions open for further discussion.

Do not put any non-public blocking steps in your process

You must not have anything that can block a release or development process be non-public. For example, you don’t want to be in the position of telling your community something is broken in a private test environment and you can’t recreate if for their review.
Look through your entire process, identify the non-public parts, and figure out how to expose them.

You may have some testing and development infrastructure that is non-public and need to work out how to make them public. In some cases, the best you can do (for at least the short-term) is to make reports public. You may end up helping other people to create a similar environment in a public cloud simply to make sure processes are kept flowing.

Use version control for your content as well as code

That way everyone can watch the changes.
Being able to roll back work encourages people to be bold and innovative. One of the currencies of project work is simply making a change to a codebase or a document as an explanation itself. Changes are self-evident in the commit itself. This is why all changes must be accompanied with a comment or summary that explains the reasons behind the change.

Version control for your documentation is the meta-documentation that provides the context of why.

Equally important is that all project members watch these changes. Responding to the changes on a forum, bug report, or documentation discussion page keeps the discussion associated with the node of origin.

Choose open tools that can be extended

Don’t choose tools just because your small team knows them the best. Be careful of choosing something because you are in a hurry and need something quickly.
When it comes to tools, talk with trusted community leaders about what you should use. Make governance as clear as possible Even if you choose something out of step with other community members, you will at least know why you did and be prepared to mitigate risk.

It is risky to choose closed tools that a community cannot easily scale itself.

Make sure everyone has an equal and clear method for access to write-commit to open tools

With version control under code and content, you can open access to more people. For example, don’t require people to go through a lengthy process or to "prove" themselves with X number of patches. Give people access to whatever they need to make a difference, even if they don’t use the access.
Wikipedia is a prime example here. They use the power of the community size to police bad content changes, rather than limiting the community size behind rules of what it takes to write content changes.

More people want to do good for your project than want to do bad. Don’t punish the do-gooders because of the potential evil someone might do.

Make governance as clear as possible

Whatever they are looking for, whatever they need, your contributor community does not want a confusing governance structure.
Listen to feedback and make document changes to evolve the language and understanding

From that may come evolution of the governance itself, with the corresponding transparency at getting there.

Do not let poisonous people bog down the community

Remember the paradox of tolerance: if you are tolerant without limit, your ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant.

Seek consensus, use voting as a last resort

Most decisions in an open community are not decided by a vote. As in a well-working democracy, decisions are handled by the experts and knowledgeable people who are in charge at the will of the people around them.
Voting is best left for deciding who is in charge and the occasional very contentious issue. Don’t you wish it weren’t contentious? Wish you could go back and make a consensus?

Do not forget to release early and release often

It’s crucial to the success of an open collaboration that no part of the work is held back "until it’s just right."

Many of us have the tendency to keep code, content, or ideas to ourselves until we get them finished enough, polished enough for others to review. In open source development methodologies, that perfection seeking is the enemy of the good enough.

Innovation is a process of building on existing ideas, in novel or even repetitive ways. We need others to see our ideas early and often so their influence can improve the ideas before they are too fixed to be improved.

Make it the rule that nothing is held back until finished. Treat it like a Zen practice—release early and often, every day or every hour if need-be.

Release early and release often is for more than just code

Every idea deserves the light of day as early as possible.
A common mistake is to wait to release a document, process, marketing plan, etc. until it is "just right". People who otherwise fully understand how not to do this in code forget when it comes to other parts of a project.

Apply this rule:

- If a piece of information is confidential, keep it private;

- Otherwise, get it out in the public soonest using techniques such as:

- Bounce the idea off the mailing list(s)/forums

- Make a wiki page

- Add to another wiki page

- File a ticket in a tracking system

- Make a non-coding prototype

- Wireform web page in a wysiwyg editor

- Graphical mock-up/collage

- Bar napkin and pen, scanned or photographed

Evolve with the growth of your audience and contributors

It’s easy to say, "We designed this for such-and-such a reason for this particular audience." It’s not so easy to be the only creator and maintainer, though. If you want to grow beyond just you and your niche group, you have to be willing to accept the influx of new ideas and directions that comes with open collaboration.

Use a predictable schedule type and stick to it

There is a lot of disagreement over how fast an open source project should move. Many projects have found the six month release cycle is not too long nor too short.

Regardless of what type of schedule you choose, you need to stick to it and keep your community informed about the status of the schedule. Remember, it’s OK to disappoint people sometimes, but not surprise them.

There are two main types of schedule for delivering open source:

- Time based

- Feature based

One reason time based schedules are used so often in open source is that it forces developers to release early and often, and not sit on code waiting for a feature to be completed. Incremental updates provide the community a chance to keep up, help, and contribute.

Even if you follow a feature based schedule, it is useful to break it down to smaller, time-based deliverables. This keeps your community interested and able to test, knowing that at regular, predictable intervals there will be something for them to try out.

A good teacher is a good student - ask questions and put yourself in a position of being taught by others

People of all ages and experience levels have knowledge and curiosity to contribute. You can engage with what they know and what they want to know by putting yourself in the position of learning from them, even as they may be learning from you.

Part of practicing the open source way is teaching others about how and why they want to adopt this way of working, thinking, and acting.

In all your interactions, it helps for you not to presume that you are an expert and know all there is to know. Even in domains you are familiar with, ask basic and dumb and open and revealing questions. Ask any questions that help you make sure to reveal and map the principles of The Open Source Way to an individual domain.

Strive to drive barriers as low as possible

Open projects need to have low barriers of entry. People and organizations are giving of their time and other resources, so if you are going to make them leap over any barrier, it needs to be a clear barrier with a clear reason. Otherwise, it’s an invisible problem that makes people disappear before you even know they are there.

If new participants come along and run in to a real, implied, or accidental barrier, a certain percentage of them will just walk away at that moment. At the very least, if you inform those people of what the barriers are and why they are there, then these folks will walk away informed instead of bailing out of ignorance.

If you want open collaborators, you must make all barriers as low as possible. You must advertise this access-level clearly.

If there are levels of access, such as "can write to the mailing list and file bugs" all the way over to "can commit major code changes to the source repository", then you must make it clear what these levels are and how to obtain them.

Wikipedia is an example of everyone entering at the same level. There are, however, community levels that are implied and centered around a group of information pages. It is easy to make an edit on a page, even anonymously, but to get that edit to stick (not be reverted by another page watcher in the information community), other, more invisible barriers need to be overcome. This may discourage some casual editors, if the information community around a set of pages are very strict about allowing anonymous edits. Other pages may not have that strict of an information community around them, so anonymous edits are stickier. In the end, this may affect Wikipedia’s reputation—some people have experienced or perceive that Wikipedia has an invisible barrier to entry they can’t see or overcome.

Highlight activity and participation

People want to see themselves and to see what others are up to. It is why sitting at a cafe is considered more special than having coffee at home. It is a social space, just as the elements of an open source community happen in social space.

Build systems and processes that make it easy to highlight the activity within the community. In some cases, this might be gamification, with badges, leaderboards, and the like.

In most cases, this includes making sure that everyone is acknowledged by name and type/area of contribution when you conduct a release.

Turn newcomers into instant contributors with the Power of To-Document

Make your community culture be to document answers when asking for help. Ideally, the documenting should be done by the asker. And systems should make it easy for them to do so.

People offering help can require that the help be documented.

When the asker is a new member of the community, this is a great way to turn them into an instant contributor.

Four shared virtues

These four virtues were described by Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman in their seminal talk on avoiding poisonous people in communities.

- Politeness

- Respect

- Trust

- Humility

These virtues need to be implemented in every part of the community. Public and private discussions, all communication channels from in person to IRC, and sometimes even in the nature of the project itself.

Have a clear understanding of the users (and contributors) you hope to assist and engage

This is something that comes from your initial project and community planning. It should form some part of your metrics plan, the way you measure the ongoing health of your community for what it provides to its members.

When there is evolution in thinking here, as the project changes, this clear understanding needs to be updated. There is a side-effect of feature creep—the phenomenon of how the quantity of features increase via input from users and stakeholders while development is underway. Features that creep and sneak their way into a release may end up attracting more and different users and contributors.

These new people are not a bad thing in any way. But if they are unexpected and unnoticed, they become an underserved part of the community. In their bubble, this underserved group has its own understanding of what the project and software needs to do for them. Until you open that bubble and include them in the community view as a whole, their entire worldview is at risk whenever a change comes through the project.

Healthy projects entail thoroughly documented (and continuously evolving) governance models.

Governance is not a static document and process to be adhered to year after year.

As the project evolves along many lines, so should the governance evolve in response, and even in anticipation.

You should have robust change management for governance and encourage it to be used early and often.

Governance is covered further in the chapter "Project and Community Governance".

Visible leadership

Whoever is in charge of the largest or smallest things, it needs to be clear who they are, how to reach them, and so forth.

Leaders should be out in front, doing the work with others.

This is all part of the idea of what some call a _do-ocracy—a culture of those who do things become responsible for getting things done.

Clear responsibilities for leaders

In healthy projects, members have formally documented release processes and identified release managers to supervise those processes.

Healthy open source projects have publicly shared goals and clear processes for reaching those goals. Goals are attainable and clear deadlines exist for tracking progress toward those goals.

Community audits

The audit process outlined in this chapter uses a worksheet when conducting the audit. In this case, we have the first worksheet available for the external health check.

You can download the file here:

https://github.com/theopensourceway/guidebook/blob/master/worksheet_for_community_audits.ods

This is an Open Document Format spreadsheet with the following features:

- First sheet "Overview" is a single overview of all the questions.

- These questions are in the form of a main question that forms the basis for the sub-questions. The sub-questions may not be applicable to each project, but the main questions always are.

- Each section such as "Structure", "Release Management", and "Outreach" has it’s sheet with the sub-questions.

- Scoring or notes can be kept on each sheet for roll-up purposes.

- There is a concept of a health percentage by how many of the questions in each section are answered "yes" or in the positive. A "no" or negative response indicates something essential may be missing or in trouble in the project.

This list is not comprehensive per-se, but we feel it represents a good overview of what a single, determined individual can discover about a project with one to four hour’s of attention and interest. That is, if a user comes to your website and has a positive experience that leads them to becoming a contributor, it is greatly influenced by the set of elements this audit looks at. These are the control points you have for helping that experience turn out positive.

Here is the overview of a process for using this worksheet:

1. Give yourself up to 30 minutes per section (labeled sheets); any more time than that may indicate this is an area with a problem or something that doesn’t fit with the audit process. Make a note and move on.

2. Work only with publicly available information; don’t seek out project maintainers for answers, the point of the audit is to see what the average person experiences.

3. You can parse out the sheets to other people who have more expertise in that area, if it helps.

4. A health "score" can be derived by tallying up all the parts that are in place or good enough as is, compared to how many are missing or needing improvement.

5. When you are done, write up a report with a narrative that explains the missing or needing improvement parts.

- Be aware that at times you may not be aware of a practice that is sufficient but not apparent, because of some aspect of the programming language, build systems, etc.

Addressing mental health and burnout of moderators and community leads

The sub-section is here to remind you to seriously consider the mental health and burnout risks for members of your community.

Community leaders hold an important role of holding the project together, especially when things are not going well in the world and lives of the other contributors. For this reason, we have a complete discussion for people who are in this role in the chapter on self-care strategies for community managers.

Individual community members are subject to many of the same stresses, responses, and situations as community leaders. You will find that chapter largely applicable to any community member, although it addresses and focuses primarily on community managers.

In addition to those materials, there are some other areas to consider that apply to all members of the community:

Burnout

Anyone in the project can experience burnout. In addition to the effects of the individual’s choices that may lead to burnout, there are a number of systemic and institutional causes of burnout. You may not be able to fix all of them, but acknowledging they exist can go a long way toward helping people feel less personally responsible for things that are out of their hands to effect.

Self-care to community-care

Self care is often focused on the responsibility of the individual. Of course, as individuals we have a personal responsibility for our well-being but we often are responding to the culture, policies, and procedures of the systems we’re working with/engaging with. A community-care approach focuses on lightening the burden of the individual by bringing in the structure and support of the community as a whole.

Social strategies

As part of community-care, this may provide strategies for managing self-care. Engaging people with appreciation, joy, and acceptance is an antidote to feelings of not being enough, low motivation, and feeling apart—even all the way to feelings of guilt and shame.

Understanding Community Metrics

Introduction: What’s a "healthy" open source community?

A healthy open source community is one that demonstrates open practices, uses open infrastructure, and cultivates an open culture with the goal of becoming more sustainable. But even for the most seasoned community managers and community architects, measuring an open source community’s health is a complex, difficult, and occasionally intimidating task.

That’s because any picture of project health is actually a mosaic; multiple factors combine to depict a community’s overall health. You’ll never find just one indicator you can point to and say, "See? The community is healthy."

What’s more, the factors that determine overall project and community health are always changing. In the past, for example, some may have pointed to "total number of download" as a health metric. But today we understand that even millions of downloads does not reflect the fact that a communuity’s production and quality assurance processes might be out of sync—or that trolls are misbehaving on the project’s mailing lists. A more complete picture would consider not only results or outcomes (like downloads, release cadence, etc.), but also processes (onboarding barriers, how easily a project can discover and promote maintainers, etc.).

This chapter explains in more detail the importance of a metric-driven approach to building, maintaining, and growing an open source community. It outlines a few important factors to consider when assessing an open source project’s and community’s overall health. And while every commuity is different—and therefore requires different metrics for measuring success—this chapter offers a few example metrics you might consider when measuring your own community’s successes.

Why community metrics are important

Establishing and maintaining community metrics is important for several reasons, including:

- Providing objective measures

- Promoting a culture of transparency

- Encouraging community participation

- Identifying potential community bottlenecks

Let’s explore each of these in more detail.

Providing objective measures

For any organization, you want to have a set of objective measurement to help you understand how you are performing. For businesses, it could be things like revenue, new customer aquisitions, costs, etc. that you can look at periodically (e.g., quarter-over-quarter) to see how you are progressing. For open source projects, it is also helpful to have a set of metrics that can help measure the health of your community. These could include things like number of contributors, how long it takes to close bugs/issues, responsiveness of reviewers, contributor diversity, etc.

Promoting a culture of transparency

Transparency is a key ingredient in all open source projects, so it is important to have insight into all contributors to your project. This isn’t necessarily to rank or highlight the most active contributors. Rather, this is to get a better sense of where the contributions are coming from (e.g., different geography, organizations, etc.). When you start going beyond 20-30 community members, it starts to become more challenging to have a good insight into all contributors if you don’t have a good set of metrics.

Encouraging community participation

Community metrics will not necessarily provide a full picture of the community, but they do offer important insight into the state of the community. For example, metrics can show if there are regular activities on project’s code, bugs/issues, documentation, etc. for the project. Also, when people join a new community, they typically struggle with identifying and connecting with more experienced members. If the metrics dashboard includes a list of active documentation contributors, that could be useful for anyone interested in contributing to project documentation. Some communities even have a dashboard of first time contributors to highlight new community members. These may seem like small things, but they could go a long way to help new community members onboard into a project and feel welcome.

Identifying potential community bottlenecks

As open source projects grow, you will typically face challenges with responsiveness to community members. For example, code reviews may take longer or you may see a growing backlog of issues. If you have a good set of metrics (e.g., average time to close issues, median time for code review, etc.) that you review on a regular basis, they could serve as early warning signs before you start to have a number of dissatisfied community members.

Basic considerations

Before you determine how you will measure project and community health, you’ll need to determine what you’re going to measure. You might begin by looking at:

- Project life cycle

- Intended audience

- Governance

- Project leaders

- Release manager and process

- Goals and roadmap

- Onboarding processes

- Internal communication

- Outreach

- Awareness

- Ecosystem

Let’s examine each one of these in more detail.

Project life cycle

An open source project’s life cycle affects many other considerations about a project’s health. Understanding the project’s place in that life cycle will help you contextualize your assessment (e.g., single-person governance can be common when a project is young—but less effective when a project is more mature). Monitoring contributor trends might reveal critical information about a project’s short-term or long-term future.

When assessing the project’s life cycle, consider questions like:

- When was the project founded, and how old is it?

- How often do new contributors join the project?

- How frequently does the project accept new contributions?

Intended audience

Well-run open source projects demonstrate a clear understanding of the users (and contributors) they hope to assist and engage. When assessing a project’s intended audience, consider questions like:

- Has the project clearly identified a intended audience, and who is it?

- Is the intended audience the most appropriate one for this project?

- Does the intended audience engage with competing or complementary projects?

Governance

Governance refers to the rules and customs that define who does what in an open source project and how they are supposed to do it. Healthy projects entail thoroughly documented (and continuously evolving) governance models. When assessing a project’s governance, consider questions like:

- What is the project’s governance model, and is it publicly documented?

- Does the model account for both technical and business concerns?

- How do project members make and enforce decisions?

Refer to this guidebook’s chapter on governance for more consideration of this topic.

Project leaders

In healthy projects, leaders are visible and easily identifiable. Leaders often coordinate project work and establish a project’s vision, and usually have extensive knowledge of project history. When assessing a project’s leadership, consider questions like:

- Who are the project leaders?

- What are the project leaders' responsibilities, and are they focused more on engineering, marketing, or some combination of both?

Release manager and process

In healthy projects, members have formally documented release processes and identified release managers to supervise those processes. When assessing a project’s release manager and process, consider questions like:

- Is the project’s release process documented?

- Does the project have an identified release manager?

- How often do project release updates occur?

- Do project releases occur on a steady and predictable schedule?

Goals and roadmap

Healthy open source projects have publicly shared goals and clear processes for reaching those goals. Goals are attainable and clear deadlines exist for tracking progress toward those goals. When assessing a project’s goals and roadmap, consider questions like:

- Are project goals clear and public?

- Does the project have a clearly communicated process, and is it also public?

- Do project participants have a history of meeting project deadlines?

Onboarding processes

New contributors are vital to project innovation and success. Healthy projects feature clear, welcoming onboarding materials that assist newcomers who wish to participate in the project. When assessing a project’s onboarding processes, consider questions like:

- Does documentation explain precisely what the project is and how to use it?

- Does documentation help new contributors get involved in the project?

- Does the project accept contributions of more than one type (e.g., development, marketing, project management, event planning)?

Internal communication

Communication channels are key indicators of project health, as are a project’s internal communication practices. Issues affecting community health often emerge first in internal channels—such as mailing lists or chat platforms—where contributors and users interact. When assessing a project’s internal communication, consider questions like:

- Does the project have sufficient communication channels?

- Can people find and use these channels effectively?

- Are channels regularly moderated?

- Is channel communication governed by a code of conduct?

Refer to this guidebook’s chapter on communications norms for more consideration of this topic.

Outreach

Outreach is the process of actively promoting a project and making others aware of it. Communities use written materials (e.g., social media, blogs, whitepapers), events (e.g., meetups, conventions), and educational tactics (e.g., demos, training sessions) for outreach. Healthy projects have adequate energy and resources devoted to outreach. When assessing a project’s outreach efforts, consider questions like:

- Does the community use clear and consistent methods for outreach? If not, does it plan to establish a set of outreach methods?

- Are people writing, talking about, and promoting this project and its technologies?

Awareness

The project’s intended audience must be aware of the project and understand the problems it solves. Awareness is a desired outcome of a project’s outreach efforts and can be measured through user and contributor surveys or general marketing analyses. When assessing a project’s awareness, consider questions like:

- Is the intended audience aware of the project?

- Can people in the intended audience explain the project’s uses, features, and advantages over alternatives?

- Do others working in an industry that would benefit from the project know the project exists?

Ecosystem

No project exists in a vacuum. Projects frequently depend on one another. In some cases, similar projects can be competing to reach the same intended audiences. A community’s interactions with other projects in its ecosystem reflect the project’s health. When assessing a project’s ecosystem, consider questions like:

- What are the project’s dependencies and what projects depend on it?

- Is the community sufficiently integrated into the overall project ecosystem, intended industry, and organizations that may use the project?

- Do members of that ecosystem view this project favorably?

Choosing the right metrics for your community

Because no two open source communities are the same, every community will naturally have its own set of metrics for measuring health and success. Many factors can influence a community’s choice of metrics, but one of the most important influences is the community’s goals.

Some communities, for example, prioritize how quickly they’re able to merge code—so they track metrics related to this ability. But other communities consist of users and contributors working in heavily regulated industries (like energy or health care), where necessity dictates that decisions to merge new fixes and features take a longer time. Those communities probably wouldn’t emphazize speed of code review as much as, for example, code review efficiency.

Depending on its goals, a community might establish metrics for measuring things like work backlog, contributor diversity (e.g., organizational, geographical, etc.), flow of first-time contributors, localization and internationalization, or popularity of discussion topics. Communities should always establish metrics collaboratively and agree on them collectively. Hearing from a diverse group of community members is important for ensuring the metrics are inclusive and not just focusing on the work of a subset of the community.

It’s also a good practice to review the metrics periodically with the community and discuss if any adjustments are needed for your metrics. Even within the same community, you will likely need to evolve your metrics along with the community as your needs change.

Resources for developing metrics for your community

Take advantage of available resources in your software tools

In the past, many people wrote complex scripts/queries to get metrics for their communities. Nowadays, most of the software tools (code repositories, forums, issue trackers, wiki’s, etc.) that open source projects typically use have APIs, plug-ins, or even built-in dashboards that makes it easy to collect data for your community. So if you use tools like Discourse, GitHub, GitLab, Jira, or others, you may be able to save a lot of time by reading their documentations prior to implementing a new set of metrics from scratch.

The CHAOSS project

Not surprisingly, there’s an open source project that is focused on community metrics. The project is called CHAOSS (Community Health Analytics for Open Source software) and it has community members from academia, companies that participate in many open source projects, open source foundations, and others. If you visit the CHAOSS website, you will find details on metrics across different categories plus implementation examples for many of these metrics.

If you browse through CHAOSS metrics, you will likely find plenty of metrics (and implementations) that will be applicable to your community. If you have an idea for new metrics that are not yet in CHAOSS, you can also start a discussion on new metrics in the CHAOSS community.

Resources/examples from other communities

A number of open source communities have good documentation/code for their community dashboards that many other communities can take advantage of. Many readers may be familiar with the CNCF dashboard and you can find details on their devstats project for their dashboard in the CNCF’s repo at https://github.com/cncf/devstats.

Another good example is the Ruby community dashboard and their FAQ page, which provides good insight into why they developed the dashboard and some of their implementation decisions.

Some communities publish contribution metrics after each release. Here is a good example from WordPress after their recent release, where you will see a lot of good visualizations for where the contrbutions are coming from.

Metrics pitfalls

Metrics are certainly important, but there are definitely shortcomings that we need to be aware of.

- People often measure the most easily measurable in their metrics: this is human nature as we all want to do what’s easier. However, you run the risk of neglecting important aspects of the community if you only focus on easily mesurable metrics in your community. For example, it’s often easier to focus on inputs (e.g., number of commits/merge requests/pull requests) compared to outputs (e.g., the impact of a commit/merge request/pull request). Needless to say, ignoring outputs from the community will provide an incomplete picture of the community.

- Over-reliance on metrics will provide an incomplete insight: No set of metrics will provide a full picture of communities (or any organizations for that matter). Although it is important to have a standardized set of metrics so that you can gauge your community’s progress over time, there will always be things that are extremely difficult to measure or quantify. For example, we all want contributors to feel a strong sense of belonging in the community and enjoy collaborating with other community members. Whether this is happening or not would be difficult to quantify, but you still want to have a good sense on this aspect of community health even if it requires other means besides metrics collections.

- Ignoring intrinsic motivation: people often join (especially volunteer) organizations because they are intrincically motivated. For example, they strongly identify with group’s mission or enjoy a sense of belonging with other members. If there is too much emphasis on people’s contribution (or input) in metrics, you run the risk of losing sight of why people joined the organization in the first place. Most contributors in open source communities are volunteers who contribute in their own time, so ignoring their intrinsic motivation can often lead to negative consequences in the community.

Refer to the chapter on participant motivations for more on the topic of intrinsic motivations.

Beyond these shortcomings of metrics in general, the following are particularly relevant to open source communities.

- Gaming contribution metrics: this usually happens when metrics are used as a main (or even a sole) basis for recognition in the community. Not suprisingly you will see behaviors like people submitting multiple commits/merge requests/pull requests for trvial changes when they could have accomplished the same thing with a single commit/merge request/pull request.

- Vanity metrics: you also see vanity metrics outside of open source. A good example is placing too much emphasis on things like the number of social media followers. As in social media, quantity isn’t everything. Also, if you want to ensure that community members' intrinsic motivation is satisfied in the community, vanity metrics is definitely not a good way to go.

- Making comparisons between different open source communities based on a few metrics: sometimes you will hear things like, "Project A had more than 5,000 attendees in their last conference," or, "Project B has 1,000 contributors," and people have similar intentions for their community. Before you are tempted to compare your community to others, it’s important to consider if you are making apples-to-apples, that is, a like-for-like comparison. You may be in a different industry, in different stages of project maturity, or have a different scope, etc. and a direct comparison may not be appropriate. Before you think about wanting 1,000 contributors in your community, you may want to ask basic questions like do you really need 1,000 people to accomplish your project’s goals?

- Too much focus on code contributions: it may be because there are more tools available to capture code activities, but there’s a tendency to focus mostly on code contributions in open source communities. However, it is important to remember other valuable contributions such as answering questions on forums, triaging issues, maintaining wiki pages, etc. There should be an effort to ensure that community metrics reflect a variety of contributions (both code and non-code) so that no one in the community feels left out.

Metrics dos and don’ts

Finally, here are some dos and don’ts when you are working with open source community metrics.

Dos:

- Do make metrics public: This may be stating the obvious, but transparency in open source should also extend to metrics. When you develop metrics, it helps to include a diverse group of people in the process so that metrics are inclusive and consider all contributions. Also, if any adjustments need to be made for your community metrics, it’s likely that we will first get that feedback/suggestion from community members. Also, all metrics should be open to everyone so there is confidence in the data.

- Do use metrics for spotting outliers: metrics are particularly useful for highlighting areas that aren’t doing well. Good examples are things related to throughput such as time it takes for close issues, forum posts to be answered, code review, etc. In these examples, metrics are a great tool that can help identify potential bottlenecks early.

- Do use metrics as a starting point for gaining further insight into community health: Metrics may tell you what is happening in your community, but you typically will not know the why just by looking at the numbers. If the metrics shows that the number of first time contributors are declining, you will probably need to have some one-to-one hallway or phone conversations in order to identify the causes of the decline. Metrics will highlight the symptoms as a starting point, but people will then have to do the work from there.

Dont’s:

- Don’t use metrics as a sole basis for rewards: we already discussed gaming of contribution metrics previously if you only rely on metrics for rewards in the community. In addition, if people perceive that rewards and recognition are mostly based on the volume of work (or input), you run the risk of discouraging people who aren’t able to devote as much time to the project or people who are getting started in the community. People do not join open source communities just to do more work and we do not want to lose sight of their intrinsic motivation.

- Don’t present metrics without a proper context: even when you get asked what sounds like a straightforward question like "how many contributors do you have in your community?", it is always helpful to get some context behind the question. Depending on who is asking the question, they’re usually asking for something slightly different. For example, the total number of contributors in project’s history may be appropriate in one context, but in another the growth of contributors over a time period may be what the questioner is really after. Also what do they mean by contributors? Do they also want to include people contributing to internationalization, issue triage, event planning, etc.? So before we simply point people to a set of metrics, it is helpful to understand the context or even motivation behind their question.

- Ignoring non-metrics: As discussed previously, not everything is easily measurable or quantifiable. Even if we have a well defined and polished metrics dashboard, it should not stop us from continuing to have human conversation with community members to keep a pulse on what is happening in the community and encourage community members to point us to what we are not able to see in our metrics.

Announcing Software Releases

Introduction

One of any open source project’s functions is releasing software with the goal of reaching as many users as possible. To help projects succeed, you’ll need to ensure that you distribute news of your release in a timely fashion, to the widest relevant audience, and with the right information.

Following some basic guidelines for coordinating release announcements can ensure that your excellent work doesn’t get lost in the shuffle. Remember that these are only guides; you community’s practices may differ.

General guidelines

- Do not set any release date for a Friday or significant holiday. The ideal release date for maximum coverage is Tuesday.

- If at all possible, coordinate major releases with relevant conferences and events.

- Tailor release announcements and blogs to encourage both use of the software as well as contributions to it.

- Talk about how a project benefits the user; explain benefits rather than focusing on technical details.

Track: Release candidate and final release for major point release X.0

Follow or adapt this process for a major point release (X.0):

1. No less than three weeks from release date:

1. Create a collaborative document (Etherpad, Google Doc) to include highlighted features for the release announcement, press release, and blog post.

2. Two weeks from release date:

1. Generate a changelog outlining notable changes to the release that will need to be documented and included within the main changelog file.

2. Merge any relevant content from the updated changelog into the release announcement, press release, and blog post.

3. Create press release and send to your organization’s media relations team for vetting.

3. One week from release date:

1. Schedule social media content for distribution before, during, and after release date.

4. Three days from release date:

1. Confirm release manager and engineering lead have signed off on release announcement and blog post.

2. Confirm media relations staff have signed off on press release.

5. Two days from release date:

1. Complete all final QA/smoke tests.

2. Place build on appropriate servers.

3. Stage all documentation and review it for display issues.

6. One day before release date:

1. Send copies of press release to relevant media outlets.

7. Day of release:

1. Make all code and documentation visible to the world.

2. Begin publishing scheduled social media and blog post materials.

3. Post press release on newswires (in conjunction with media relations team).

Track: Release candidate and final release for point release X.Y

Follow or adapt this process for a Y point release (X.Y):

1. No less than 2 weeks from release date:

1. Create a collaborative document (Etherpad, Google Doc) to include highlighted features for the release announcement and blog post.

2. One week from release date:

1. Schedule social media content for distribution before, during, and after release date.

2. Generate a changelog outlining notable changes to the release that will need to be documented and included within the main changelog file.

3. Merge any relevant content from the updated changelog into the release announcement and blog post.

3. Two days from release date:

1. Ensure the release manager and engineering lead have signed off on release announcement and blog post.

2. Complete all final QA/smoke tests.

3. Place build on appropriate servers.

4. Stage all documentation and review it for display issues.

4. Day of release:

1. Make all code and documentation visible to the world.

2. Begin publishing scheduled social media and blog materials.

3. Send copies of press release to relevant media outlets.

Track: Final release for minor point release X.Y.Z

Follow or adapt this process for a minor Z point release (X.Y.Z):

1. No less than one week from release date:

1. Schedule social media content for distribution before, during, and after release date.

2. Generate a changelog outlining notable changes to the release that will need to be documented and included within the main changelog file.

3. Merge any relevant content from the updated changelog into the release announcement and blog post.

2. Two days from release date:

1. Ensure the release manager and engineering lead have signed off on release announcement and blog post.

2. Complete all final QA/smoke tests.

3. Place build on appropriate servers.

4. Stage all documentation and review it for display issues.

3. Day of release:

1. Make all release artifacts and documentation visible to the world, if not already (release may be synced to mirrors ahead of actual release announcement).

2. Begin publishing scheduled social media and blog materials.

After all major releases and significant point releases

1. Conduct a retrospective to see what, if anything, could be done to improve the next release cycle.

Writing a press release/release announcement

Writing and distributing a release announcement would seem relatively straightforward; however, some strategies for doing this work are more effective than others. Specifically, you should write your release announcement in a way that makes it most likely for a media outlet to pick it up.

Below is a template for a release announcement, with some guidelines. Please note that this is only a guide; copying exactly what’s here may not be effective for your project.

Be direct and factual about information you share in public statements. Avoid hyperbole ("the bestest project ever made!!!") and speculation ("the only project that can do this"). Media outlets rapidly disregard such hyperbole and might avoid spreading the word about your release altogether.

Release announcements are not opportunities to hype your project (as tempting as using them for this purpose may be). You can and should take the opportunity to thank your hard-working community. This gives credit to those who’ve done the work and emphasizes the free and open source nature of the project.

Be clear and concise. Support your claims with facts. This will help get your announcement more broadly disseminated.

Sample press release/release announcement

Project X, the [main purpose of project: goals, functions, governance…] project, today announced the general availability of Project X x.y, a community-driven [description of project]. This latest community release includes several new features, including [list of newest features].

Developed by a global community, Project X is a [detailed paragraph of what the project is, what it does, and any other pertinent information should be included here.]

Notable enhancements to Project X x.y include:

[Detailed paragraph describing a first major feature]

[Detailed paragraph describing a second major feature]

[Detailed paragraph describing a third major feature]

A complete list of Project X x.y features is available on the Project X community release announcement page [URL]. Project X x.y [detailed description of a two or three additional features].

[If possible, add a quote from a prominent community member or technical lead about the new release here.]

Additional Resources

- Read more about the Project X x.y release highlights [URL]

- Get more Project X updates on Twitter [URL]

- Read more about Project X community events [URL]

About Project X

Project X is [a very detailed description of what the project is and what it can do].

Contributors

Chapters writers

- Presenting The Open Source Way

- Author(s): Karsten Wade

- Community 101: Understanding, Joining, or Forming a New Community

- Author(s): Bryan Behrenshausen, Dave Neary, Karsten Wade

- New Project Checklist

- Author(s): Lisa Caywood, Josh Berkus, Bryan Behrenshausen, Karsten Wade

- Creating an Open Source Product Strategy

- Author(s): Dave Neary

- Communication Norms in Open Source Software Projects

- Author(s): Leslie Hawthorn

- Editor(s)/Reviewer(s): Paula Dickerson (lead), Editorial team

- To Build Diverse Open Source Communities, Make Them Inclusive First

- Author(s): Lauren Maffeo

- Editor(s)/Reviewer(s): Bryan Behrenshausen (lead), Marina Zhurakhinskaya (subject matter expert (SME) reviewer), Editorial team

- Why Do People Participate in Open Source Communities?

- Author(s): Gordon Haff

- Editor(s)/Reviewer(s): Brian Proffitt (lead), Editorial team

- From Users to Contributors

- Author(s): Dave Neary

- What is a Contribution?

- Author(s): Karsten Wade

- Essentials of Building a Community

- Author(s): Andy Oram

- Onboarding:

- Author(s): Ray Paik, Bryan Behrenshausen

- Creating a Culture of Mentorship

- Author(s): Karsten Wade, Guedis Cardenas

- Project and Community Governance

- Author(s): Dave Neary, Josh Berkus, Bryan Behrenshausen

- Editor(s)/Reviewer(s): Bryan Behrenshausen (lead), Editorial team

- Community Roles

- Author(s): Andy Oram, Karsten Wade

- Community Manager Self-Care

- Author(s): Ashley Nicolson

- Editor(s)/Reviewer(s): Karsten Wade (lead), Dr. Karen Hixson (subject matter expert (SME) reviewer), Editorial team

- Defining Healthy Communities

- Author(s): Karsten Wade

- Understanding Community Metrics

- Author(s): Ray Paik, Brian Proffitt, Bryan Behrenshausen

- Editor(s)/Reviewer(s): Brian Proffitt (lead), Bryan Behrenshausen, Editorial team

- Announcing Software Releases

- Author(s): Brian Proffitt

Project teams

- Editorial team:

- Brian Proffitt (lead)

- Shaun McCance (lead writer)

- Bryan Behrenshausen

- Paula Dickerson

- Karsten Wade