Tips for the aspiring Open Source Project

Facilitated by Rob Schley and Louis Landry

We will discuss things that new and aspiring open source projects should think about and plan for in order to maintain long term stability and community participation. As facilitators, we will offer lessons learned through our involvement in the Joomla project.

Getting people involved – lower barrier of entry. Make it easy to get people involved.

Description of Summer of Code and Geehab (sp?) Reducing bureaucracy – make it efficient Reward system – for activity done in community (competition and prizes given) Evan talked about reward system in Ruby on Rails

People want to contribute in these communities – they’re not doing it just for the monetary rewards.

To keep people around in a project, you have to keep the maintenance costs low. Other projects successfully keep a weekly summary. Summary of new features, and assocated links, etc..

Early success for Joomla was lots of themes were developed early on. Mambo association helped marketing wise.

Shared the history of evolution from Mambo to Joomla

Lots of discussion about the differences in the Ruby on Rails community and Joomla! community to demonstrate the differences in in community management.