I’m a community guy in a company that has lots of products, both open source and commercial, I’m lucky enough to get paid to work on open source projects. What I’ve learned in my work with the community is that building a successful project takes more than many people think.

Some folks in the corporate world have a distorted view of how open source projects work. A lot of the corporate types hear about open source and think that sprinkling magic “open source” dust on their product will suddenly make it successful. They’ll have contributors pile on and massive marketshare will follow. Soon they’ll have a “best of breed” product and do very little actual work since the community will be writing the software, testing it, providing support, etc. Admittedly, I’m exaggerating to some degree, but only slightly.

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There seems to be a misconception about what’s required to build a vibrant open source community and it’s not “community management”. Community management focuses on providing infrastructure and facilitating communication for a community. This includes setting up events, maintaining TO-DO lists, keeping forums under control, making announcements, etc. And that’s all well and good, in fact it’s vital. However, although this role is important it will likely not lead to any significant growth in your community. Communities need Leadership in order to grow because leaders create a vision of the future that draws people to their communities and motivates them into action.

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This particular post deals with the benefits and challenges of product management.  Where it’s been and where it’s going as it relates to open source.  First, I know what you’re thinking … product management in open source? That can’t be, and in some cases its true (See the summary of Pidgin’s resizable textbox).  In other cases there is too much “traditional” product management and not enough community driven product management.  So what is the happy medium and how should open source projects approach product management?   In this post I’m going to look at how community driven PM differs from traditional PM within a commercial open source project.

Let’s start by looking at a definition of product management.  Product management is discovering, documenting, and prioritizing user stories with the objective of maximizing some combination of users, sales (more…)

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Ever wonder why some open source projects are insanely popular and others struggle to get mind-share?  I do, all the time, especially since the “insanely popular” part is what I’m striving for as a Community Manager at Novell.  I recently read a great book entitled “Designing for the Social Web” by Joshua Porter.  In his book Joshua describes the life-cycle of a user interacting with a website and points out the various hurdles that must be overcome in order to create an active user.  This got me to thinking (dangerous) about the similarities shared between the life-cycle Joshua outlined and what open source projects go through.  I thought I’d write down my thoughts on this topic before I forgot them (more…)

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I have to admit that I’m a bit of a collaboration and community junkie and as such follow some obscure topics.  One topic I’ve had on my radar for quite some time is Flock Theory.  Flock theory tries to describe the self-organizing and emergent aspects of human behavior.  Succinctly put, behavior in some cases is not a property of any individual person (or bird), but rather emerges as a property of a group or social network (flock).  This concept can be used to describe aspects of both collaborative teams and open source communities.  I’m don’t want to analyze the merits of the theory but I do want to introduce its concepts which I think have implications for team/community productivity and possibility even individual information relevance. (more…)

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