Challenges projects face when going open source

Challenges

• Mindset
  • Choosing a license and it's implications to your project
    • Legal aspects
    • Adoption Aspects
    • Dependencies requirements
  • Identifying governance characteristics of your project ?
  • should we describe some places where you can open source your project ? (e.g. GitHub, foundations, pay to play foundations) ?
• Building a community
  • Why building a community ?
  • Community growth
    • Community involvement lifecycle
  • Community involvement
  • Documentation
  • Testing

Action plan

• Change your mindset: Communicate and Listen!!!
• License check for your libraries / dependencies
• Prepare your project
• Choose your license
• Prepare basic documentation for users
• Prepare a how-to guide for contributors
• Identify the common Vision and the benefits for the Community
• Share your initial Roadmap

Advantages

• Prepare your project to be adopted from anyone
• Improve the overall quality of your project

Building a community

Challenges

• Find the right tools
• Find the right people (not only skills)
• Find a good approach to engage champions
• Community support

Action plan

• Build a website to share the project, docs and links
• Tools: issue tracking, forum, mailing lists, IRC / IM
• Make a manifesto for sharing how to be a good citizen
• Define a contribution path based on merit
• Identify community champions and invite them as moderators (metrics)
• Identify external communities in the nearby to arrange events, webinars
• Accept contributions from anyone and give feedback in any case
• Don't hide any information to your Community
• Define a achievements plan for any action or contribution made by users
• Ask for feedbacks to your Community

Advantages

• You finally have a Community, you are not alone :)
• An healthy Community will improve the overall quality of your project
• Citizens that are feeling at home will bring more contributors in the Team
• Part of your reputation will be based on how much your Community is happy

Diversity in open source projects

Challenges

• Having a very wide Vision on the project
• Longevity for your project
• Disagree in public without destroying relationships
• Resolve conflicts within the Community

Action plan

• No single employer
• Share the management with your community champions
• Translate the website, docs and the product in different languages

Advantages

• A multiethnic Community bring different cultures with more value and ideas
• An international project typically has more contributors and a long life

Why open governance

Challenges

• Trust on your Community :)
• Give responsabilities

Action plan

• Engaging people by merit: apply the Do-acracy model
• Reliability with community consensus
• Define a vote mechanism to engage your Community

Advantages

• Transparency is a fact for auditing
• Avoid effort spent only for a single person or company
• Decision taken from community consensus are accepted by anyone