Community Website
Learning from each other
Lots of hard questions and a few simple suggestions.
David A. Mellis
Fritzing Workshop – Potsdam – 18 Sept. 2007
BRINGING PEOPLE IN
- What do we want in the community?
- What's the target audience?
- How do we get people interested?
- How can we include people from all over the world?
EVOLVING THE PROJECT
- How do we find out what people want?
- How can users contribute?
- How can developers contribute?
- How should we manage bugs and tasks?
- Who writes the documentation?
BEYOND THE PROJECT
- How do people find things others have done with the project?
- How do we help people use each other's work?
- What do people need to know besides how to use the software?
- What else might people do with the software?
SETTING DIRECTION
- How do we balance beginner and advanced needs?
- How do we balance individual and group needs?
- What do we support?
- How do we encourage people to help each other?
- Who makes decisions? How?
- What structures need to be in place at the beginning?
Suggestions
- Make it open-source all the way down.
- Make the software seamful.
- Communicate early and often.
- Create a mailing list of the workshop attendees but let others join.
- Make the documentation a public wiki, but don’t use that as an excuse not to write it yourselves.
- Licenses matter.
- Meet users in person.
- Publicity counts.
Your turn.
