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5min chapter
Episode 89: Practitioner Guides: #3 Organizational Participation
CHAOSScast
Enhancing Organizational Participation in Open Source Communities
This chapter explores the essential functions of community managers in enhancing engagement in open source projects. It highlights the significance of inclusivity, transparency, and relationship-building to cultivate a thriving community and improve project well-being.
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Speaker 1
Because I think in a lot of cases, when you have an organization and the people who work for that company are the ones who are always providing feedback on PRs, who are responding to all the questions, who are basically doing all of the work within the project and not leaving space for other people to contribute, which I think people don't necessarily think about, but it's important to have things like good first issues and things like that where you can encourage
Speaker 2
contributors
Speaker 1
who don't work at your organization to participate in that project.
Speaker 2
I completely agree with you, Dawn. And I think that that's the role that a community manager can make sure that that is happening, that there is a friendly, welcoming, onboarding experience, that documentation is up to date and well written and friendly in tone and all of those things that a community manager does, of course, I'm biased. That's primarily been my role for a very long time, but just the value that a dedicated person can bring to it, a resource community can really make all the difference. Because maintainers are busy and that piece of their job doesn't always get counted in a PR. So if a maintainer is doing all the things they're supposed to do, they're merging in PRs and they're responding to issues and comments and all of those things are showing up in the metrics and that's the thing that matters to the folks at the company, then all of those things that don't happen in a PR are not going to get counted and they're going to get deprioritized. Is that a word? They're going to get to the bottom of the list. And those are the important things that don't get counted that go to the bottom of the list, but a community manager would make sure that they're not going to the bottom of the list and that they are building the community the way it should be built.
Speaker 1
The other thing that I really think community managers can help facilitate is increasing transparency within a project, because that's also something that's sometimes hard in some of these organization-dominated projects, where it's really easy to have discussions in private channels within your company, or to have a private JIRA instance where you're supposed to only put the customer-specific private stuff, but people end up putting almost everything there and then nothing happens in the GitHub or GitLab issue tracker. So I think community managers, Ospo leaders, even, you know, super savvy maintainers can help facilitate some of that transparency and making sure, because you do have to kind of enforce it, because sometimes people get a little shy and they don't necessarily want to do things in the open. And you do sometimes have to kind of enforce that within companies where you have to say, no, you can't put that here. You have to do this in the public channels.
Speaker 2
And the community managers and OSPO folks
Speaker 1
certainly help facilitate that. I
Speaker 2
think it's also interesting when folks are trying to contribute to a project that is owned by primarily one company. The contributions don't necessarily fit with the company's vision of the project and just kind of navigating that space where contributions are welcome, but they have to align with the company's vision for this project. And if you have other companies coming in that maybe don't want the project to go in a certain direction, there can just be a lot of discussion and a lot of feels. People have feels in this field. And so someone like a community manager can kind of help just navigate that whole process and make it a little smoother and just really be there to make things a little bit easier for folks on both sides, I think.
Speaker 4
I actually think that, in as much as the community managers and the maintenance help to kind of regulate the health of our projects and contributions, I think that our organizational participation sometimes make a project closed where these participants, only the specific company, tend to reduce the health of that particular project because of their lack of contributing to that particular project, or they have numerous engagement and busy schedules. So I think if organizations that are more dominant with some projects could make it a little bit more open for other contributors to participate, regardless of the fact that they might not be part of these organizations, it will not just help in making community managers their duties a lot easier, but it will also increase more diversities and more inclusion in those projects, regardless of its specification.
Speaker 1
Yeah, absolutely. And I think companies sometimes overlook when it comes to open source projects is that they have loads of relationships with other people who work at other companies who probably use this open source project. So in a lot of cases, these will be customers of the company, but they can encourage specific people to contribute to improve the skill level in the project, to improve diversity, to basically bring more people into the community because they have these relationships with these other people at these other companies. And so I think a lot of times people just think that the contributors are just going to sort of appear by magic in that open source community and it can take some work and don't hesitate to leverage those relationships that your organization has with other companies and the people who work for those because I think that is a good way to bring more people into the community, to get more diversity into the community and just have an overall healthier community in general.
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Discover
highlights
Listen to the best highlights from the podcasts you love and dive into the full episode
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Listen to the best highlights from the podcasts you love and dive into the full episode