So you’ve got a community .. now what?
A presentation at GitKon 2022 by Ruth Cheesley
So you’ve got a community … Now what? @RCheesley
Ruth Cheesley (she/her) Mautic Project Lead ruth.cheesley@mautic.org speaking.ruthcheesley.co.uk for slides, recordings, links and resources @RCheesley
Photo by Peio Bty on Unsplash Challenges ahead. Scaling communities can be full of challenges!
Growth, but not at the expense of culture. • As the community grows, it becomes ever more important to focus on culture. • What might have been a mutual understanding needs to become explicitly communicated. • You will have to take action against individuals who are not behaving in accordance with your expectations eventually.
Converting folks from takers to makers. • Delegating ‘getting stuff done’ from you / a small team to others. • Knowing what to delegate, when, and how. • Trusting others to do as good a job as you! • Empowering, appreciating and rewarding those who step up.
Avoiding burnout (you, and them). • Scaling a community of any kind can seem like a never ending, thankless task. • Driving contributor growth has to be done sustainably, for the contributors and for you. • You need to be able to switch off from your community completely - set up the conditions to allow that to happen sooner rather than later.
Photo by nzooo on Envato Setting yourself up for success. Suggestions for tackling the challenges
Growth, but not at the expense of culture. • Provide clarity • Core values, mission, vision, Code of Conduct • Governance - how decisions get made • How stuff gets done • Set the bar high, and keep it there • Model positive engagement • Act quickly and decisively against poor conduct (and own your mistakes, too) • Establish systems of self-moderation
Converting folks from takers to makers. • Capture tasks in a centralised system where folk can nd, assign and work on them. • Document how people can get involved across different roles - even if you have no active contributors in that area yet. • Decide how and when you will recognise fi contributors.
Avoiding burnout (you, and them). • Find a peer support group: CMX, DevRel Collective • Set clear boundaries, model healthy behaviour, encourage and support contributors to do the same. • Check in regularly with your key contributors for a friendly ‘coffee chat’, especially if there is any change in behaviour.
Keeping an eye on community health. Tools to help you track your community health.
Determine what is important. • Be wary of vanity metrics! • What actually makes a difference to this project or community? • What will you do with the metrics that you are tracking? • What about measuring non-code contributions?
Find a tool that works for you. • Should not add extra workload. • Should measure the things that you care about. • Tools to consider: • cauldron.io - https://cauldron.io/ • GrimoireLab - https://chaoss.github.io/ grimoirelab/ • Orbit - https://orbit.love/ • SavannahCRM - https://www.savannahhq.com/
Ruth Cheesley (she/her) Mautic Project Lead What questions can I answer? ruth.cheesley@mautic.org speaking.ruthcheesley.co.uk for slides, recordings, links and resources @RCheesley
Growing and scaling communities in the open source world isn’t without its challenges. As a project starts to gain traction, there is often a need for more ‘makers’ - people who are regularly contributing to the project -’ but it can be difficult to set up the workflows and processes to empower keen community members to take on responsibility.
In this short talk, Ruth will explore some of the key challenges that are faced when scaling a community, some top tips to set your project up for success at the start, and how to keep an eye on your community health when, as a maintainer or leader in the project, you have a million other things on your radar.
Resources
The following resources were mentioned during the presentation or are useful additional information.
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Mautic
Mautic is an open source marketing automation platform which is disrupting the marketing automation industry. It’s free to download and use, with a growing ecosystem of SaaS providers including Acquia, the primary sponsor of the open source project.
It’s built by a worldwide community of marketers and developers, united by our belief in empowering organizations with the tools they need to deliver world-class automation and personalized experiences to their customers.
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Mautic on GitHub
Mautic’s codebase on GitHub
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CMX Hub
A community for community builders.
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DevRel Collective
The DevRel Collective exists as a place for DevRel professionals, Community Managers, and others to share resources, learn best practices, support one another, and be amongst our peers. We participate in and nurture communities as our jobs, but we, too, need a community of our own. This is that place. We are over 1,800 professionals (and growing all the time!) from all walks of life and all over the world.
If you’re a DevRel Professional and are looking for your people, here we are! Join us!
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Cauldron
Tool for tracking metrics in communities.
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Grimoire Lab
The aim of this project is to provide an open source toolkit for:
Automatic and incremental data gathering from almost any tool (data source) related with contributing to Open Source development (source code management, issue tracking systems, forums, etc.) Automatic gathered data enrichment, merging duplicated identities, adding additional information about contributors affiliation, calculation delays, geographical data, etc. Data consumption and visualization, allowing filtering by time range, project, repository, contributor, etc.
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Orbit
A great community health tracking tool.
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Savannah CRM
Savannah is an Open Source Community Relationship Manager (CoRM), which is like a Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) but with a focus on community building rather than sales.
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Mautic’s 90 Day Savannah Report
Our publicly shared report detailing activity in the Mautic Community over the past 90 days.
