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Ask HN: How do you effectively build an open source community?

10 points by Warewolf-ESB ↗ HN
We have recently moved away from proprietary software and made our ESB open source (hosted on GitHub).

How do you effectively get community participation in the project? We have put our project on OpenHatch. Are there other open source project directories that where keen participants might be searching?

Here is a link to the GitHub page if you want to check it out - critique away! https://github.com/Warewolf-ESB/Warewolf-ESB

4 comments

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sgdesign
One thing I've started doing for Telescope (an open-source HN clone: http://telesc.pe) is holding weekly hangouts where people can come up and talk about what they've been doing with the app.

Here's the latest one: http://www.telesc.pe/blog/telescope-hangout-3/

I also try to showcase what people are doing with the app as much as I can: http://www.telesc.pe/showcase

Oh, and I blogged about the whole open-source experience in general here: http://www.telesc.pe/blog/open-source-lessons-learned/

Warewolf-ESB
Thanks for your feedback - some nice ideas!
hackerjam
here. here. this guys walks the talk. his ability to document the process is very helpful to people who want to get involved and support open source projects but are technically challenged and don't know where to start or how to use the tools, like google, to self-diagnose when something doesn't work right.

i know cuz i have read a lot of what has been written about that project. the medium blog post, for instance, is a keeper.

if you are looking for an exemplar of what a good open source project looks like, start with that, but there are other fantastic open source communities you can use as an example. one that comes to mind off the top of my head -- joomla. but there are many, many more. take projects that are posted on github - which by the way has done a fantastic job of building community in the oss ecosytem -- plus the projects_qua_repositories posted in this space are goldmines of sharing and giving back.

like i said, the best oss projects are fully documented and provide lots of walk-throughs, tutorials and problem-solving fora to provide (non-judgemental) helping hands to n00bs and get them started. you couldn't ask for more.