Melody Kramer
| Tags | Communication, Communities, Retention, Volunteer Developers |
|---|---|
| Primary Session | Growing the MediaWiki Technical Community |
| Secondary Sessions |
How do we maintain and grow the technical community and ready it for the mission ahead? Maintaining and growing a technical community is difficult, particularly when the majority of that community is contributing their time and code on a volunteer basis. However, we can look at other successful projects for guidance, to see what we can learn and apply to our own movement: Clearly articulating the value for participants. It's important that we articulate what participants will get (socially, professionally, personally) from contributing to our projects, and it's important to socialize that value through feedback loops, communication, and positive reinforcement. One of my favorite projects - the Smithsonian Transcription Project - hired a full-time community manager for their volunteer community. It was her role to pair participants with projects, follow up to ensure things were going well, and intervene if changes needed to be made. Creating feedback loops that reinforce the value for participants. It's not enough to get people in the door; we must continually reinforce why participation is meaningful for both participants and the mission of free and open knowledge. People will have different reasons for participating - some want to build a skilset, others want to contribute to a meaningful project, still others are completely an assignment. The value for all of these participants differs, and the messaging/communication should reflect that. Finding pathways to participants through non-technical means. GitHub does it particularly well. They want to reach students. So they have a space - https://education.github.com/ - aimed at teachers. This is a particularly smart strategy: How do we reach participants where they are, and think about conduits who might identify possible participants?
- 100WikiCodeDays: The project #100WikiDays is successful because it creates a habit for participants, gives them ample feedback, provides them with community support, and gives them a goal. Are there similar efforts that we could think about re: code contributions?
Continually communicate the value: The best open source projects continually communicate to participants and the larger world about what's happening. Someone files their first bug report? Great, maybe they get an email saying 'Here's the next step you can take.' Someone creates a tool for Tool Lab? It's amazing? Send them to the blog for a profile. Let's elevate their work and use it to bring others in.
