The hard sell
Posted 9 months, 3 weeks ago at 15:06. 5 comments
I had the privilege of attending FSOSS last week.
This is a great open source conference put on by the people at Seneca college in Toronto. The conference is now in its second year, and is priced right to actually allow many smaller open source ventures or individuals to attend. I even got the opportunity to talk to a few high school students who were able to attend because the price point didn’t overwhelm their nascent interest. But I digress…
One of the major themes this year was building community and the various problems inherent therein. Even Microsoft sent a speaker, Bryan Kirschner, to discuss how Microsoft is trying to build a community around its own open source efforts. Regardless of whether you trust Microsoft’s initiatives or not, I respect Bryan a lot for coming into what has traditionally been a very hostile environment and trying to rally support without being defensive.
A lot of projects — e.g. Microsoft, OpenKomodo, Miro — are just starting (relatively speaking) to build their communities. They’re dealing with issues that are a little different than ours: how do I attract people to my project vs. project X? Some of these projects have the added benefit of being newer and/or flashier than us (Miro). Some of the projects will be effectively capped by their target audience (OpenKomodo). Microsoft just has to get past 25 years of bad blood. 
Mozilla shares the recruitment problem of these other projects, but increasingly our problem is also one of retention: how do we keep the testers we already have (many of the newer projects *are* seductive), and how do we embrace new people who do show up to help and not scare them away?
