Dawn Foster

Maintaining an open source project is hard work that often extends out over several years, and maintainer burnout is common within open source projects. It can be hard for already overworked maintainers to balance the day to day work required to keep the project running while investing in activities to increase future sustainability. The good news is that we have best practices, resources, and templates available to make it easier for maintainers and projects to build a contributor strategy that leads to a strong and growing community for an open source project over the long term. This talk will help you apply those resources in your project. This talk will have several major sections. 1) Discussion about the major factors that impact contributor growth. 2) Developing and executing on a long-term contributor growth strategy, including governance, new contributor onboarding, and mentoring. 3) Using contributor ladders to promote contributors into leadership positions as more maintainers to share the workload can reduce maintainer burnout over time. 4) Metrics for measuring project sustainability. The audience will walk away with a better understanding of how to grow their contributor base and build a community around their open source project.

Maintaining an open source project is hard work that often extends out over several years, and maintainer burnout is common within open source projects. It can be hard for already overworked maintainers to balance the day to day work required to keep the project running while also investing in additional activity to increase future community sustainability. This includes getting help with all of the different types of contributions required to make an open source project successful: documentation, marketing, community management, and so much more. The good news is that we have best practices, resources, guides, and templates available to make it easier for maintainers and projects to build a contributor strategy that leads to a strong and growing community for an open source project over the long term. This talk will help you apply those resources in your project. This talk will have several major sections. 1) Discussion about the major factors that impact contributor growth. 2) Developing and executing on a long-term contributor growth strategy, including governance, new contributor onboarding, and mentoring. 3) Using contributor ladders to promote contributors into leadership positions as more maintainers to share the workload can reduce maintainer burnout over time. 4) Metrics for measuring project sustainability. The audience will walk away with a better understanding of how to grow their contributor base and build a community around their open source project.

Many projects struggle to find people who will actively participate in their projects and continue to participate over the long term. We are in a situation now where there are a lot of open source projects and not enough contributors. Maintainers are burning out and in desperate need for help. This session will provide practical advice and suggestions for ways to encourage participation while avoiding some common barriers that prevent people from contributing.

Maintaining an open source project is hard work that often extends out over several years, and maintainer burnout is common within open source projects. It can be hard for already overworked maintainers to balance the day to day work required to keep the project running while also investing in additional activity to increase future community sustainability. This includes getting help with all of the different types of contributions required to make an open source project successful: documentation, marketing, community management, and so much more. The good news is that we have best practices, resources, guides, and templates available to make it easier for maintainers and projects to build a contributor strategy that leads to a strong and growing community for an open source project over the long term. This talk will help you apply those resources in your project.

This talk will have several major sections. 1) Discussion about the major factors that impact contributor growth. 2) Developing and executing on a long-term contributor growth strategy, including governance, new contributor onboarding, and mentoring. 3) Using contributor ladders to promote contributors into leadership positions as more maintainers to share the workload can reduce maintainer burnout over time. 4) Metrics for measuring project sustainability.

The audience will walk away with a better understanding of how to grow their contributor base and build a community around their open source project.

Your company has just started an open source project, but where is the community? This talk provides practical tips and suggestions along with what not to do when building a community around your company’s open source project.

Building a community around your company’s open source project is no easy task, and there is no magic bullet or one size fits all solution. However, there are some things that you can do (or not do) to increase the chances of successfully building a community for your project.

A few of the dos and don’ts covered in this talk include:

• Planning and product management: Do use a transparent process in the open with tools that allow anyone to participate. Don’t use your internal tools and private meetings to make all of the decisions.
• Encourage participation: Do be proactive about helping community members contribute in meaningful ways. Don’t inadvertently set the expectation that employees will be the ones always answering questions and making decisions.
• Be honest: Do be honest with yourselves about where and how you prefer to have community members contribute. Don’t encourage people to contribute in areas where you are less likely to accept outside contributions.
• Managing contributions: Do have enough people trained in how to provide constructive feedback to manage the flow of incoming community contributions. Don’t assume that your existing developers have the time and skills to magically perform this difficult function.

The audience will walk away with practical advice about building communities for corporate open source projects.

You probably know that community metrics are important, but how do you come up with a plan and figure out what you want to measure? Most open source projects have a very diverse community infrastructure with some combination of code repositories, chat, mailing lists, wikis, forums, and more. Deciding where to focus and what to measure across these many technologies can be a challenge.

What you measure can have a huge impact on behavior within the community, and you want to make sure that you are encouraging people to contribute in sane ways by measuring the activities that matter for your project.

This presentation will cover how you decide what to measure and provide some examples.

Why settle for boring numbers and static graphs to describe your project when you can dynamically display the movements and activity within your project? Gource is a flexible open source tool that can be used to display activity from your repositories using a video visualization that people love!

Gource is an amazing and flexible open source tool that can be used to display activity from your repositories using a video visualization that people love!

With this flexibility comes a dizzying array of options and configurations. This talk will show some of the more useful options within Gource to help you select the ones that will work best for your project. Gource can also be used to display non-repository information (bug trackers or mailing lists) using the custom log format. Other topics include related tools, generating video files, and more.

The goal is for you to walk away from this talk with ideas and techniques for how to create awesome videos showing the activity within your open source projects and communities.

The leading configuration management tools, Ansible, Chef, Puppet, and others, are open source products, so active communities have formed around these technologies. The people participating in this community are one of the things that really stand out. When you ask about the best part of this community, the most common response is “the people,” since they tend to be welcoming, friendly, knowledgeable, and most importantly, helpful. The community certainly isn't perfect, and there are some challenges. This talk will cover a variety of wonderful and not so wonderful things about the configuration management community.

Open source communities are filled with huge amounts of data just waiting to be analyzed. Getting this data into a format that can be easily used for analysis may seem intimidating at first, but there are some very useful open source tools that make this task relatively easy. The primary tools used in this talk are the open source Metrics Grimoire tools that take data from various community sources and store it in a database where it can be easily queried and analyzed.

This talk will cover: CVSAnalY to gather and analyze source code repository data; MLStats to gather and analyze mailing list data; other Metrics Grimoire tools for bug trackers, IRC, Wikis and more; and Gource to visualize source code repository data.

The audience for this talk is anyone who is interested in learning new ways to extract data from open source communities. This talk will be interesting for people participating in communities, data geeks, researchers and others who are interested in learning more about communities. The audience should have basic data science knowledge, including running database queries and basic data manipulation tasks.

Do you know what people are really doing in your open source project? Having good community data and metrics for your open source project is a great way to understand what works and what needs improvement over time, and metrics can also be a nice way to highlight contributions from key project members. This session will focus on tips and techniques for collecting and analyzing metrics from tools commonly used by open source projects. It's like people watching, but with data. The best thing about open source projects is that you have all of your community data in the public at your fingertips. You just need to know how to gather the data about your open source community so that you can hack it all together to get something interesting that you can really use.

This session will provide a basic intro to Tizen and will talk about the community transition from MeeGo to Tizen. We'll do a quick recap from past year of the MeeGo community along with some things we learned along the way. The rest of the presentation will talk about what we are doing to form the Tizen community and how you can participate. I'll also gather feedback during the Q&A on what you would like to see us do differently in the Tizen community.