Build an amazing development community


Who your contributors are and how they act determines whether your 
project succeeds or fades into limbo. In this tutorial, you will learn 
how to evaluate your existing community, how to design a strategy to 
improve it, and how to implement that strategy to create lasting 
greatness. Donnie Berkholz has experience doing exactly this as a leader 
of Gentoo Linux, a community of 250+ developers.

To create a cohesive community, contributors must be evaluated purely on 
the basis of their attitude and behavior. There is no such thing in an 
open-source community as someone whose technical prowess makes up for 
his poor behavior. That person chases away many times as much potential 
contribution as he ever personally contributes. In this tutorial, you 
will create an attitude report card based on a list of values that are 
core to your organization's culture, then you will learn how to apply 
that report card to each of your contributors.

Designing and implementing a strategy to improve your community has 
three core aspects: recruiting new contributors, improving existing 
contributors, and getting rid of the lost causes. When recruiting new 
contributors, consider that a good contributor will participate in your 
community for many years, so personality and enthusiasm trump knowledge 
every time. Knowledge can be learned, but a person's core personality 
traits are extremely resistant to change. Improving your existing 
contributors must start at the top and work its way down. The most 
well-respected members of your community must set examples for others to 
follow and must be intolerant of behavior inconsistent with your 
community values. Finally, those contributors who no longer fit into 
your community culture must adapt or leave, by force if necessary. If 
they are allowed to remain, they will act like a cancer within your 
community, fooling new contributors into treating them as role models 
and growing the cancer. To cure that cancer, it must be cut out at the 
source.

At the end of this tutorial, you will have a concrete set of actions 
specific to your community that you can apply to build a closely knit 
group of collaborative, outstanding contributors.


Additional notes:

Participants will create a values statement for their community, apply 
that to create an attitude report card for contributors, and use these 
to form a strategy for making their communities the best they can be.