Guide :: Guide to Successful Community Building

As a project grows, it needs to renew itself by accepting new committers. A project needs to learn how it can recruit new developers and committers into the community. Accepting new committers usually increases the diversity and strength of the project. Community building requires energy which could have been spent on code development, but this cost is an essential investment for the future of the project.

The openness of the community is not only measured by the number of contributors. Open and respectful discussions on the mailing lists are vital. Community members must learn ways to resolve technical conflicts without destroying personal relationships.

Email lists are the lifeblood of Apache communities. They are the primary mode of discourse and constitute a public and historical record of the project. Other forms of communication (P2P, F2F, personal emails, instant messaging platform posts, and so on) are secondary. There are well-founded fears about the use of other forms of project communication. Though some projects successfully blend other forms of communications, projects need to take care since out-of-band communications have led to difficulties in the past. The reason is that conversations on other than the public email list exclude parts of the community. Public instant message communication can be exclusionary due to time zone constraints or conflicting time commitments by community members who would want to participate.

Apache project email lists are public, archived and searchable. This allows anyone to monitor (both in real-time and by browsing the archives) what’s happening. Opinions expressed are in the open and poor behavior risks a poster’s reputation.

Private communications tend to be more candid but also more likely to be ill-judged. Backchannel communication tends to be divisive, excluding some members of the group. This tends to have a corrosive effect on the collective spirit of the community. Trust erodes when opinions backed by blocks of developers appear from nowhere, fully formed, on the email list.

Communication through other channels also reduces the chance of serendipity. As with most social networks, most subscribers to a email list never post and most posts come from a tiny minority of subscribers. Some passive subscribers are just interested in where the project is going. But others understand related fields and have a limited intersection of interest. This second group will often post when a topic in which they are interested arises on a list. Using public email lists to develop designs allows the chance encounter of ideas which often results in innovation.

If a project uses alternative forms of communication, it is essential to try to minimize the chances of problems arising. All matters of substance need to move back to the email lists. Projects need to preserve, and post back to the lists, significatn conversation threads in other channels. Projects should post regular reminders that other secondary forms of communication exist.

There is a limited number of topics, such as security issues and discussions about people, which it is best to handle in private. As much business of the project as possible should take place on public lists, but the private list is available for matters of a sensitive nature. Good netiquette requires that you seek permission from the poster before making public posts made to a private list. Try to avoid cross-posting between public and private lists. Take care not to post a reply to a private post to a public list without permission.

Learning to use email lists effectively is very important. If your project community can achieve this, it has a good chance to be lively, active and thriving. The future looks bright.

Before a podling graduates, it must create a diverse and self-sustaining community. Community-building is tough: it takes time, effort and more than a little magic. There is no secret recipe, just hard work. To address this challenge, committers may need to devote more time to community-building and less to development.

The community email list is open to all Apache committers. This is the right list for questions about the Apache community and on community-building. Subscribe using your Apache email address.