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?
1 comment:
hi,
I'm one of these "non-technical folks". Totally overwhelmed by alfresco functionality, roadmap and openness.
I own a small DTP company - several thousands of pages each year, 5 people. Recently we have focused on the standardization and cross-media publication. Therefore, we have concentrated on the automatic XML production and sophisticated management of the repository.
After several months of studding and searching I have become devoted to alfresco. :)
What I, as a decision maker, would appreciate is more articles focused on the user (e.g. WCM 2_1 Product Evaluation Guide.pdf was a great work done). ...I'm wondering that the following discussion possibility to each article in the wiki could be really helpful. (maybe forum topic linked to the page?)
Concerning the user interface - more information about new flex based client, its functionality and customization possibilities would make me happy, too. ;o). (I'm not sure if there is any progress in this area)
As a company form the publishing sector we are looking for more information about recent and planned integration of adobe standards (JDF, PDF) - as same as others (DITA, Docbook). But that is more "technical" point of view.
There is a lot in our "Wish list", but it is nice to see that alfresco is heading the way we want to move.
I would love to be helpful as much as I can (so I can give back something little of what we are taking).
Unfortunately, we still do not have any developer in our team. Therefore, the only thing I can do, right now, is to try to answer some of the basic questions people have in the forum. Or is there anything else? How I can get more involved eventhough I'm "only a user"?
Our alfresco customization is really at the low level (as same as our knowledge about alfresco development :( ). Anyway, we are trying hard and slowly moving to our alfresco development and production environment 1.0. :) - hope to have first prove of concept next week..
Best regards,
Daniel
Post a Comment