SxSW: Building the Open Source Society

This was a core conversation lead by Stephanie Geerlings and Jesse Cooke.

How do you promote your project:

Articles/blog posts
Twitter – not as powerful as a a blog post
Screencasts – really gets people interested – it’s important to note that this can be time consuming but practice makes perfect
Get users to promote/education people – especially in government (in Hawaii they have released over 400 state and government sites on WordPress – but the people there still seem to think they need to pay for a system)
Get community members to education/promote/mentor because the bigger the project the higher the barrier to entry
Going where the developers are – be in the right IRC channels or on the right mailing lists
Documentation is key – if people can’t use your documentation no one will use your product – a great example of documentation are the VagrantDocs
Have first experiences be pleasant – website and personal experiences

How do we sustain the collaboration:

Text does not lend itself to working together well – sometimes opening up a hangout or Skype will save a project

Open communication – if you use something like a hangout to communicate then the log of that conversation is lost – it’s not transparent.
One of that things we haven’t done well as a community is to explain that open source is not free – we need to take in to consideration the time it takes to support the project – and promote it – this includes peer review
Get companies using your product to help financially – if those companies can’t give hours it would be great if they helped with crowdfunding
IEEE releasing a tool this summer to help with open source communities and collaboration
Don’t be an echo-chamber – don’t only hang out with people in the same field – keep it multidisciplinary to get the most out of it

How do we thank people who don’t participate in writing code:

Badges or some sort of equity system where people can show their worth
Self promoting – explain where the project would be without you/your contribution
If people are designing logos or something that isn’t code related get them set up on git anyway so they can play too – people want to see their name on the project and get credit for their contribution even if it’s not code
Put an acknowledgements page together to thank those who don’t write code
Thank people by sending them to conferences (if you have the funding) maybe give it an award name so people can put it on their resume to show what they achieved

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