Communitization
From The_Open_Source_Way
This a stub page that explains the what, how, and why to apply a community process to an idea. The idea might be for a product, a new social awareness group, or a gardening community.
Definition
Communitization is the process of applying open collaborative community principles to an idea or an existing project or product.
A project is the collective effort by a group of people to create some output. It is generally an open source community project, but it may be a new project not yet decided if it is going to be open, or acquired code or content and/or a team who began work as a non-open project.
A product is the effort of taking the output (such as source code and content) from a project and making it so a customer can pay a vendor for the added-value, such as service and support.
Products have communities, just as projects do. There are points if similarity and difference between these community types.
Product communities
If your product is open source, it needs a project community.
- Attract people passionate about using and evangelizing the product.
- Draw people looking for how-to answers.
- Is the base that majority of contributors come from. (E.g. 75% in Fedora.)
Project communities
If you are open source, you need one of these.
Your product may not matter, but if you want future contributors you need something people can use and care about.
- Attract people passionate about participating in the lifecycle of the project.
- They want to give back, especially in Communities_of_practice#Invite_different_levels_of_participation legitimate peripheral activities.
- End results may have less meaning than process.
- Draw people who know the how-to answers and want to learn how-to do more, or provide more functionality.