Open Source community building: a guide to getting it right

[Everyone - from carriers to OEMs - is busy building developer communities. But many have failed and more have seen disappointing results. Guest author Dave Neary looks at what lessons history can teach us on community building and the key DO's and DON'Ts.]

Community development in open source software is not just for geeks in sandals nor for niche Linux companies any more. It’s mainstream and it’s here to stay.

The recent analysis of companies contributing code to the Linux kernel shows that large companies including Novell, IBM, Intel, Nokia and Texas Instruments are getting serious about engaging in community development. Organisations such as the LiMo Foundation are encouraging their members to work with community projects “upstream”, that is, with the community rather than in isolation,  to avoid missing out on millions of dollars worth of “unleveraged potential” (PDF link).

A diverse developer community is critically important to the long term viability of free and open source projects. And yet companies often have difficulty growing communities around their projects, or have trouble influencing the direction of the maintainers of community projects like the Linux kernel or GNOME. Sun Microsystems and AOL are prominent examples of companies which went full speed into community development, but were challenged (to say the least) in cultivating a mutually beneficial relationship with community developers. There are many more examples – but often we never even hear about companies who tentatively engage in community development, and retreat with their tail between their legs, writing off substantial investments in community development. Xara, for example, released part of their flagship software Xara Xtreme for Linux as open source in 2005, before silently dropping all investment in the community project in late 2006.

What can go wrong? What are the most common, and the most deadly errors which companies make in their community engagement strategies? And how can you avoid them? Avoiding these does not guarantee success, but failing to avoid them may be sufficient to guarantee failure.

Where to begin?
The easiest and gravest error that companies make is to sprint headlong into free/open source development with unrealistic expectations.

The history of free & open source software development is filled with stories of companies who are disappointed with their first experiences in community development. The technical director who does not understand why community projects do not accept features his team has spent months developing, or the management team that expects substantial contributions from outside the company to arrive overnight when they release software they’ve developed. Chris Grams once described the Tom Sawyer model of community engagement – companies who expect other people to do their job for them. Make sure you don’t fall into that trap.

Doing community software development well takes time, even when you get everything right. And there are a lot of things you can get wrong.

So where to begin? Before you start community development, you should have thought about what you want to get out of it. Is Open Source a way to grow the brand and broaden distribution of your product, with the goal of generating leads? Do you need to grow an ecosystem of developers building on top of your platform? Do you want to include an existing project into your product to reduce costs, but customise it to fit your needs? Each of these goals, and any of the other reasons people develop software in the open, require specific strategies and tools tailored to the situation to succeed. Indeed, how you measure success will change depending on your goals.

The two common situations company find themselves in are collaborating with an existing open source community, or growing a community around a piece of software that you are releasing.

Joining a community
When joining an existing community, building trust and reputation takes time. The first step to working productively with a community is to understand the structure of that community. Who are its leaders, what are its priorities? If the culture of a project does not align with your business objectives, that may affect your decision to engage with it in the first place.

If you find that you can work with the project, and that the general goals are aligned (or at least, not misaligned) with yours, then the hard work can start. For example, Hewlett-Packard backed Linux early, at the expense of promoting its own proprietary Unix, HPUX. Ten years on, HP now ships close to 40% of all Linux servers. In contrast, Sun Microsystems decided to create an independent community around Solaris in 2005, releasing OpenSolaris under an Open Source approved licence which is incompatible with the GPL (the licence of the Linux kernel). The Sun sponsored project failed to create a substantial independent developer community from its launch until the acquisition of Sun by Oracle and subsequent closing of the OpenSolaris project in 2010.

Once you make the decision to collaborate, and you have chosen the project you want to work with, the first and most important decision is who will work on the project. This consideration often does not get the attention it requires from top management. The engineers who will be working on the project on your behalf will be representing your company. It will be their job to build trust with project maintainers, navigate the project’s roadmap process to ensure that their work is accepted upstream, and ensure your business objectives are met.

The choice of the people who will work with the community is particularly important; as Stormy Peters, former Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, once wrote, companies are not people. In other words, companies can never be members of a software development community, although their employees may. Companies can be valuable institutional partners for projects, but to quote the Beatles and Karl Fogel, money can’t buy you love (or community support).

So now you have some engineers working with the community. What next? Havoc Pennington wrote some excellent advice in 1999 for engineers working with community projects. The one-line summary might be: “when in Rome, do as the Romans do”.

Often communities will have documented their norms – many projects, including the Linux kernel and modules in the GNOME project, have “HACKING” files under source control documenting expectations for contributions, and mailing list policies. For most communities, these can be summarised as “go with the flow, don’t rock the boat”. Miguel de Icaza, founder of the GNOME project and vice president of developer platforms at Novell, has written an article explaining the reasoning behind these policies.

One temptation which you should avoid at all costs is to leverage the trust which one contributor has gained to channel contributions from others into the project. This will only promote Shy Developer Syndrome in your team.

By all means, have your senior community guy mentor others in the team and help them through the process, but avoid making that mentor a gatekeeper, shielding the rest of your team from the community. Attempting this will always backfire when your gatekeeper moves on or when the community finds out that he’s committing the work of others and circumventing community norms.

Growing a community
Looking at the second scenario; growing a community. If you do decide to release software under a free software OSI approved licence, your first choice will be whether to set the project up as a community project or not, and to what level.

Simon Phipps has written about the different types of communities which can grow around a free software project. He describes communities of core codevelopers, non-core developers who work on add-ons, integrators who distribute and configure the software, but don’t necessarily modify it, and finally users of the software. Each of these communities have different needs, and require different approaches.

If you want to grow a community around your project, there are a few best practices you should follow:

- Control: If you opt for rules ensuring that you decide what code will be added to your product’s core, you will lose many of the benefits of community projects. Some examples of rules which come from a desire to maintain control are a requirement to assign copyright for all contributions to the core product to you, or ensuring that only employees can commit directly to the main branch of your core product. There are many good reasons to maintain ownership of the core, but this decision will severely handicap community contributions. This does not prevent you from developing other types of community, however, such as a community of add-on developers or integrators.

- Barriers to entry: Barriers that contributors have to overcome can come in different shapes: using unusual tools, requiring convoluted processes for bug reporting, feature requests  or patch acceptation, or legal forms you may ask people to sign before contributing.

- Tools and infrastructure: Ensure that you provide your users with the opportunity to distribute their work and connect with other users – whether this be through a forge for modules, or through the use of Gitorious of Bazaar for source control. Contributing in your project should be seen as a social experience.

- Community processes: Create a just environment – no-one likes to be considered a second class citizen. Document processes for gaining access to key resources like bug moderator permissions, commit access to the master branch, or editor access for the project website.

- Budget appropriately: Commit the appropriate resources – building a community takes time and effort, and that means investment – primarily of human resources.
Having one guy who is the community manager dealing with the community and a team of 10 developers behind the corporate walls isn’t going to cut it. As Josh Berkus of PostgreSQL said in his “How to Kill your community” presentation, if your nascent community feels neglected, it will just go away.

Launching a new project is like launching a new product – except that acquiring a new community developer takes much longer, and is much more difficult and costly than acquiring a new user. In the same way that companies track SAC for new product launches, tracking the Developer Acquisition Cost (DAC) for your project is a key metric in evaluating whether you are doing the right things to grow your community.

Developers have lots of projects to choose from, and they tend to gravitate towards projects where co-development is the norm. So you have to be thinking about the contributor experience, and the value proposition to external contributors, all the time.

A clear and compelling vision, with lots of opportunities to contribute, and low barriers to collaboration, can help reduce the acquisition cost of community contributors, and similarly reduce the cost of acquiring new users and paying customers.

Avoid common anti-patterns
If Best Practices are behaviours that should be adopted, community anti-patterns are best practices gone wrong. If the reasons behind a “best practice” are misunderstood, you can end up imitating behaviour without getting the desired result, much like the Pacific cargo cults, building airstrips and hoping that planes land. Like seasoning, adding too much can ruin the dish.
In general: when you see the following patterns happening, you should work to counter-act them, both in the communities you participate in, and in your corporate citizen behaviour within those projects. Each of these patterns are common and tempting, because they represent best practices applied in inappropriate circumstances. And each of them results in a net reduction of community health.

Some common anti-patterns you should avoid are:

1. Command & Control – communities are partnerships. Companies are used to controlling the products they work on. Attempting to transfer this control to a project when you want to grow a developer community will result in a lukewarm response from people who don’t want to be second class citizens. Similarly, engaging with a community project where you will have no control over decisions is challenging. Exchange control for influence.

2. Water cooler – when your team gets too much work done in private, your community will not understand your motives and priorities. By working on mailing lists or other publicly readable and archived forums, you allow people outside your company to get up to speed on how you work.

3. Bikeshed – A “bikeshed” discussion is a very long discussion to make a relatively minor decision. When you feel like the community is dragging you down, know when to move from talking to doing.

4. Black hole – It can be tempting to hire developers who have already gained reputation and skills in projects you build on. Beware when hiring developers from the community – it may be that the community will be worse off. Ensure that working in the community is part of the job description.

5. Cookie licker – Picture a child who has had enough cookies, but wants to save the last one for later. So they take it off the plate and lick it, to ensure no-one else will eat it. The same phenomenon exists for community projects – prominent community members reserve key features on the roadmap for themselves, potentially depriving others of good opportunities to contribute. Beware of over-committing, and leave space for community contributions in project roadmaps. Be clear on what you will and will not do.

Happy Community Gardening
Community software development can be a powerful accelerator of adoption and development for your products, and can be a hugely rewarding experience. Working with existing community projects can save you time and money, allowing you to get to market faster, with a better product, than is otherwise possible. The old dilemma of “build or buy” has definitively changed, to “build, buy or share”.
Whether you’re developing for Android, MeeGo , Linaro or Qt, understanding community development is important. After embracing open development practices, investing resources wisely, and growing your reputation over time, you can cultivate healthy give-and-take relationships, where everyone ends up a winner. The key to success is considering communities as partners in your product development.

By avoiding the common pitfalls, and making the appropriate investment of time and effort, you will reap the rewards. Like the gardener tending his plants, with the right raw materials, tools and resources, a thousand flowers will bloom.

- Dave

[Dave Neary is the docmaster at maemo.org and a long-standing member of the GNOME Foundation. He has worked in the IT industry for more than 10 years, leading software projects and organising open source communities. He's passionate about technology and free software in particular.]

David Neary

Dave Neary is the docmaster at maemo.org and a long-standing member of the GNOME Foundation. He has worked in the IT industry for more than 10 years, leading software projects and organising open source communities. He's passionate about technology and free software in particular.