The Art of Community

At DharmaTech, we've been collecting thoughts over the past several years on our experience using, deploying CiviCRM for nonprofit organizations, and contributing software, etc. to CiviCRM. We've recently come across Jono Bacon's book - The Art of Community - describing his experiences as the community manager for Ubuntu. We thought we'd start a wiki page to draw parallels to our own CiviCRM community and use the outline of Jono's book to guide our thoughts, comments from the code sprint, and the NP Dev Summit. We welcome your thoughts/feedback so please add your experiences to this wiki. We hope the outcome of this effort will evolve into a plan that guides and strengthens CiviCRM.

Communicating Clearly

integrators need to encourage their clients to publish case studies talking about the work and the impact
how can people feel like they belong to the community
what are the obstacles to belonging
didn't know a civicrm community existed before this conference
look at using organic groups w/in drupal to add structure
needs a "welcome to the community" post project
if sending newsletters, continue to reinforce that people belong.
support is a barrier being in a community, for everyone, it isn't important to belong.
how to better recruit/maintain interest?
Need advocates
participate in conferences, speedgeeks, forums...
it is generally felt that more ownership over parts of the project should be felt by contributors.
- Teams need to self-organize more and share/delegate responsibilities vs. assignments reticently coming from core
Developer/User participation needs to be more clearly separated; having everything in the same forum creates noise
how do we encourage large shops that implement CiviCRM for their clients to contribute their customizations back better?

Processes: Simple is Sustainable

process for getting changes into core - could increase velocity if CiviCRM was modularized??

Supporting Workflow with Tools

Releases

    Prioritize core issues from noise
    Bug bingo
    Slow down pace of release - Infrastructure release between feature releases??
    Have a sense of what bugs are critical to core - prioritize those bugs for release roadmap

Developer Barriers

    release cycles feel like there is more focus on features or more feature driven vs improving core
    code driven documentation - hard to keep documentation, api docs, etc. up to date
    release schedule is unpredictable -
    no new features in minor releases
    that there's no real distinction
    it is arbitrary when patches get accepted
    we have to fix bugs for our clients - fix in 2.2.9 and before we blink another release is in
    fixes into a release feels arbitrary
    upgrade pain??

modular approach
1. breaking the project conceptually into parts could encourage developer participation in a less imposing way that is more closely related to the immediate concerns of the organization (i.e. with CiviContribute)
2. supporting Drupal modules and hooks is the best way to extend, porting back into core if useful
  Building Buzz
need grass top exposure
the CiviCRM project homepage should sell the project better.
who is the target market?
how can we speak to them?
Need user testimonials (organization and developer)
Need to better promote prominent adopters of the technology
Public demo sites for different use cases (Civi is generally implemented in closed systems)
More large organizations adopting will be reflected by stellar developer contributions
integrator session proposal for drupalcon
networks of networks to help build vs. blasts what avenues should we follow, meetups, conferences, webinars, etc. association of fundraising professionals (afp) meeting to discuss civicrm

Measuring Community

do you have any numbers on current install base of civicrm 2.2 vs 3.0? Also any absolute numbers on users available? On, 10/8/2009, 401 sites on 3.0 (34.7%), 616 sites on 2.2 (53.3%) (rest are 2.1-). In Sept it was was 68.8 / 20.0 (total of 2500 sites)
what does the civicrm community look like? should we survey to get a sense of our community? what do we measure? lobo: ~200 in the active community (active in last 3-6 mos.)
keeping folks involved is difficult

Governance

core team, how to balance response time in the forum vs. giving a chance for others to respond

Handling Conflict

Creating and Running Events
Hiring a Community Manager