Entrepreneurial Idea #134
If you’re going to call yourself an open source community – please build a better community!
This idea is based on the fact that open source communities suck as communities.
Seriously. No offense, but there is something called the modern social network – its where people get together online, contribute, discuss and share things with each other; that’s what I expect from a community and its sorely lacking in most open source projects. IRC just doesn’t cut it – its a chatroom for the 90′s. The forum is where newbies spam their bug fix questions. On almost all open source projects, I haven’t found a place where I can call home.
Because there is no community, there is a missed opportunity for growth. I’m not saying growth in the core of the project – you still have code contributors who communicate in their respective mastered languages (Ruby, Python, C…) and who definitely contribute – but there’s a lot of people who are writing reviews, tutorials, benchmark analysis, plugins, forks, etc. on your project, and you don’t have a place for them to ‘hang’, or even showcase their work. So, they write the plugin and then disappear from your project because there is no community. There is nowhere to stay a while, to put their plugin for show in front of the whole community and get comments, appreciation, critique, or just discussion on what they’ve done.
My idea is that open source projects should build their community, and should do it by cloning a very successful model of community building pioneered by ycombinator – creating their own reddit/digg/<project name> News. Example: JQuery News – where people can put all their latest tutorials, plugins, comparisons, tips, and more, and other members can upvote them, start discussions on them, build upon them, etc (at somewhere prominent like JQuery.com/newsfeed, not some hole-in-the-wall subreddit). Like HN does for entrepreneurs, this would create a community for JQuery-ers – all the latest new things to try out (plugins, new versions, revisions, contests, etc) would be accessibly by all users of JQuery. This would foster your community and encourage members who don’t like answering newbie questions or going on IRC to become part of the contributing class in your software project.
By building this community, I imagine that your project will grow much more than it does currently.
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