Want to build an open source community? Roll up your sleeves and get dirty. Writing the code is tough but building an ecosystem is the work of the ages.
Sure some things happen naturally. In addition to making your source available you can put up forums, forges, blogs and wikis and people will use them but if you really want to see what kind of yield the garden is capable of you need a gardener or two. Gardening is hard but satisfying work – try it and you’ll see. My very first job as a young man was as a farm-hand on an arborer’s (tree) nursery – I’ve done a bit of “gardening” in my time. It was a valuable experience in my life; nurturing something, growing it, being able to see your hard labor prospering even years later. It is this same sense of making something grow that over time has caused me to gravitate away from technology and towards business. Code and other technology is by nature ephemeral. The system in which it takes shape and operates, the ecosystem is something more more enduring -- and frankly from a business sense, more important.
Alfresco has a few gardeners in the community – not all of them work for Alfresco, most do. A few of the engineers; Andy, MikeH, Gavin, Dave C, Kevin C have many many posts (over a thousand in two years.) The amount of time they spend caring for the community goes well beyond the work day. I can't thank them enough.
It’s important to put dedicated resources in to the community especially if Open Source is your business model. The ecosystem is your life-line. Alfresco gets it. With the help of
What’s your take? How do we encourage non-technical, business users to engage the community? What should the conversation be?
