Building Community Around a Software Package
It takes an active community of users and developers to sustain a software project for the long-term. Each community is made up of individuals (and organizations) with their own needs. What does it take to build and sustain a community around a software project?
This session is intended to share experiences and start discussion on ways that software development and use communities can be built and sustained.
Building community --
Three use cases in developing and sustaining a community of software --
#Ethan Davis - Unidata
Unidata history- formed by atmospheric science research and education community.... help gain access to real time weather data and tools to manage, analyze and visualize data.
- build / provide tools for working with data
- support community in use of those tools
- track technology / innovation and feedback that info to community
What seems to work
- Facilitate communication
- Provide ways to give back to the community
- e.g. governing committees
- Support is provided by developers (they are seen as part of community)
Challenges
- Takes away from time to develop software
- doesn't scale well
- focus on earth science community rather than software community
Move to Github 1-2 years ago. If you look at network graph, very active participation from community
Bug reporting
2 ways
- support pages for each package (Jira)
- and mailing list for each package (lots of reporting happens on email.)
#NCAR EOL
Building community around the field catalog software.
Challenge
- redeveloping software for same campaigns with different people, and same people on different campaigns
Field datalog
- web-based service
- to record project documentation
#OpenDAP
501-3-c status... but started out as distributed oceanographic data systems
Project strategies
- leverage existing tech
- establish dap as a standard
- open source
- hold workshops
Client side was side OPenDap knew least about...
(license is LGPL)
Looked at protocol as a product.
Draws a difference been sustaining
- software - a specific package
- - organization
Fulker - Sustainbility is about functionality
Books mentioned by James Howison:
- The art of Community - http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781449312060
- Buzzing Communities - http://www.amazon.com/Buzzing-Communities-Bigger-Better-Active/dp/098835...