Community Building at the ASF

This directory will contain practical advice to ASF projects about how to encourage and foster the growth of their project communities. This will include a variety of topics:

What

• What is an Apache community
• Who are the persona that comprise an Apache community
• How does an Apache community differ from other open source communities? How is it the same?

Why

• Why community matters to a project. (Discussion of “Community Over Code”)
• Why various groups (individuals, companies, other projects) should be involved in the project community. (Sustainability, influence, trust)
• In particular, how and why companies should get engaged in projects that they rely on

How

The bulk of the content will focus on the HOW. Practical advice to grow and retain the various parts of a project community. This includes, but is not limited to:

• Welcoming
  • Creating a welcoming environment for beginners
  • Actively welcoming new contributors
  • Welcoming, and onboarding, new Committers, PMC members
• Transparency
  • Bringing discussion back to the public list
  • Over-communicating, rather than assuming everyone Just Knows
  • Appropriate use of synchronous communication (ie, Slack, Discord, etc.)
• Articulating the project mission
  • What's in scope? What is out of scope?
  • What does it do? Who is the target audience?
• Events
  • Foundation-wide events
  • Project summits
  • Small/Local meetups
• Good First Tickets
• Responsiveness (to tickets, questions, PRs)
• Delegation (Actively delegating to beginners, so that they can build their participation muscles and confidence.)
• Mentoring and micro-mentoring
• Diversity (along multiple axes)
• Vendor neutrality

Stories

Stories and examples from projects that do this well.