Protect the community

This page collects resources from the open source world on maintaining and building healthy communities around your open source project.

Resources

• Protecting projects from poisonous people
  • Notes on this talk
  • More notes on this talk from O'Reilly
• Mailing list community care
• Avoid bikesheds (related to Wadler's Law of Language Design)
• Reaching consensus in open source
• Reaching consensus
• The community around a product is more important than the product itself
• How to Build a User Community
• How to Help Mailing Lists Help Readers
• A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy

More notes

• Build a community, not just a mailing list.
• Be very conscious of tone.
• Followup with constructivly with criticisms on blogs (ie "Thanks for you criticism, how can we do this better?").
• Be careful of trolls, and just ignore them. Possibly ban them.
• Spam can't be an afterthought. Don't think oh, we won't get spammed. Google groups does a good job.
• Listen to the community. Everyone has good and bad ideas.
• Don't pay too much attention to vocal minority. But be willing to take big risks when the community asks for them.
• Have to be willing to ask for help and delegating things.