Community Isn’t Free
At Eclipse, we talk a lot about community. Developing a community is an important part of being an open source project. It is from a community of users, adopters, and contributors that a project draws strength and longevity. Without a community, an open source project is just a bunch of code that might as well buried on a server behind a firewall somewhere in parts unknown.
I can’t think of a single open source project that has found community success through a simple application of "if you build it, they will come". Some projects are luckier than others: sometimes a technology is just so compelling that minimal effort returns huge dividends. More often, the overnight success of an open source project comes after weeks, months, and years of a combination of long work and hard work.
It takes effort to get your message out; and if you want to develop a community around your open source project, you have to get the message out. To cultivate a vibrant community of users, adopters, and committers, a project has to have somebody who is responsible for community development. Somebody has to own it. Everybody on the project team has to dedicate some significant amount of their time to community development, but one person on the team has to be responsible for it. For some projects, this may be a full time job; for others, it may be a huge part of one. In fact, may open source projects have more than one full time person working on community development. In some circles, this role might be called the project’s evangelist, or maybe it’s the project lead that manages community development. Whatever the title, the role should be that of making everybody else successful in community development activities.
