The Value of Open Source Communities
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Presented by David Smith, R Community Lead (Microsoft), at Monktoberfest October 2016. The value of open source isn’t just in the software itself. The communities that form around open source software provide just as much value and sometimes even more: in ongoing development, in documentation, in support, in marketing, and as a supply of ready-trained employees. Companies who build on open source tend to focus on the software, but neglect communities at their peril. In this talk, I share some of my experiences in building community for an open-source software company, Revolution Analytics, and perspectives since the acquisition by Microsoft in 2015.
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The Value of Open Source Communities
- 1. The Value of Open Source Communities David Smith @revodavid davidsmi@microsoft.com R Community Lead, Microsoft
- 6. New York Times, June 25 2009 (3 hours after Michael Jackson’s death)
- 7. Language Popularity IEEE Spectrum Top Programming Languages, 2016
- 10. Working with the R Foundation Supporting the R user community Continuing the growth of the R Project Linux Foundation collaborative project Non-profit trade organization
- 12. April 6, 2015
- 13. 10 Transformations to a Community Mindset Fixed Community Mindset Transformations Fixed Mindset Community Mindset 1 Waits for communities to form Accelerates new community growth (recruiting) 2 Engages friendly communities first Engages the most impactful communities 3 Goes in with an agenda to push Focus on enabling their success. 4 Begins engagement after “enough” members have joined Starts engagement when the community is launched 5 Works within the limitations of the community leader Invests in helping to better the community leader 6 Stays away from communities with competitive sponsors Engages and connects the best sponsors to the community 7 Abandons the community when the leader/group gets “burned out” Sources co-leaders for the community and evolves the community to the next related technology 8 Makes community engagement “everyone’s job” but no one’s direct responsibility Establishes a single “go to” resource accountable for community success 9 Engages randomly and opportunistically Agrees to a community engagement plan with the leader 10 Measures presentation numbers Measures community satisfaction & share (agendas, groups) growth
- 14. Community-Building Tips Be human Tell stories and promote heroes Listen, and show you’ve heard Earn trust, have trust Nurture the grass-roots Enhance the value of the ecosystem Further reading: The Art of Community – Jono Bacon
- 15. The Value of Open Source Communities David Smith @revodavid davidsmi@microsoft.com R Community Lead, Microsoft
- 16. 16 The Value of Open Source Communities The value of open source isn’t just in the software itself. The communities that form around open source software provide just as much value and sometimes even more: in ongoing development, in documentation, in support, in marketing, and as a supply of ready-trained employees. Companies who build on open source tend to focus on the software, but neglect communities at their peril. In this talk, I’ll share some of my experiences in building community for an open-source software company, Revolution Analytics, and perspectives since the acquisition by Microsoft in 2015. David Smith is the R Community Lead at Microsoft. With a background in data science, he writes daily about applications of R and predictive analytics at the Revolutions blog (blog.revolutionanalytics.com), and is a co-author of “Introduction to R”, the R manual. Follow David on Twitter as @revodavid
Hinweis der Redaktion
- Community – a new concept. Microsoft? Open Source? Tell a story about an open source project, building a business around it, and getting acquired by Microsoft. Why are we caring about community?
- The tech world is littered with the carcasses of solutions that were technically superior, but failed to survive. Betamax Smalltalk OS/2 Windows Phone 8 OGG music format Lisp (too many parentheses) Reverse Polish Notation (not enough parentheses)
- Governance – is this a safe bet? Solid organization to look after the project. A steady open source foundation? Vendor support: A reliable vendor? OSS: vendor adoption. Partner network. Training. Community resources: forums, meetups, wikis (SO), tutorials. Look at forums to evaluate. Talent pool: Education. No point investing in a project if you can’t hire staff. Best practices: Features to use/avoid. Architecture. Scalability envelope. Legal comfort: OSS, general familiarity with (standard?) license. Proprietary: understanding EULAs and pricing. Patents. I’m a community manager, so I’m just going to touch on some of these.
- 2007, called to join a startup called Revolution Computing. Goal was to build a business around an open-source language called R. That’s cool. I like R. R is a domain-specific language designed for statisticians. I’m a statistician, and I’ve been working with R since its inception. I even ended up being a co-author of the manual. Two problems. In 2007: R was unknown outside of academia The market was dominated by the largest private software company in the world. We needed to build a market from scratch.
- Job #1 was to get the word out about R to the business community. Build a community by sharing news and info relevant to the community. Had to dig for stories at first. Write at a high level, so business can see impacts. Promote via social media and newsletters.
- One of the earliest examples we found was this NYT interactive.
- Success breeds success. Look for successes in the community, and promote them. With R that was easy, Helped us by showing success in the community Helped the community by showcasing good work PR works, too.
- Build up the grassroots program About $150,000
- Value of local communities to the Sales process. Local meetups are a good source of contacts and stories. The also represent a pool of ready-trained workers for companies adopting R as a platform. None of these people are buyers. But they are heavily involved in the technical decision-making process.
- Demonstrate vendor support Enhance the value of the community Provide a professional public face for R Provide a vehicle for continuity
- It’s gonna seem like we were prescient. But this is really an exercise in retroactive continuity, like that time Star Trek suddenly decided Klingons were the result of human DNA experiments, to explain why they looked like us. The truth is, we weren’t prescient. We just did things that seemed right. BTW, sometimes there was internal pushback, especially from Sales. Conflicts about promoting base open-source versus vendor enhancements. On the community/marketing side, we focused on being part of the community, not being APART from the community. But it turned out that expanding the community while building trust was the right thing to do. We were very lucky. Also, timing was everything. Rise of big data. Rise of data science. But hopefully there are some good lessons for others to learn from.
- We enhanced the Ecosystem enough that we were acquired by Microsoft. I was skeptical. I called Microsoft “the borg”, didn’t think it would be a good fit. Microsoft is a very different company. Once Windows was king. Now it’s cloud and mobile. Satya has really changed thing. The embrace of open source comes from the top.
- Slide stolen within Microsoft “Community” has traditionally meant “Developers using Microsoft software” Open Source Software is a new and different beast. Focus on communities using OSS on Microsoft platforms. A different model. Microsoft is learning how to adapt.
- Be human: Speak in your own voice, not as a company. Search for stories! Find and help promote exceptional individuals. Communicate. Listen to what the community has to say. Embrace diversity. Show you’ve heard. This includes the bad stuff. Don’t ignore controversies, missteps, or significant “competitive” milestones relevant to the community. That builds trust. Actions build trust, too. Say you’ll do the right things, and do them. Have confidence. Trust the community. Devolve to evolve. Allow them to grow their own way; don’t direct too hard That said, you can nurture the community and help it grow. Everything you to do enhance the ecosystem builds value. Community is a big part of that.
- Community – a new concept. Microsoft? Open Source? Tell a story about an open source project, building a business around it, and getting acquired by Microsoft. Why are we caring about community?