Building a community around an open source project takes time and effort. You need to create an infrastructure to support your community (mailing list, version control, documentation, governance model etc.), you then need to ensure people know you project exists and that they are welcome to become a part of your community and finally you need to make sure that everyone is familiar with the activities of your project by reporting all decisions and activities back to your fledgling community.
Fortunately, using community tools assists with project management anyway, so the time is never wasted. However, that doesn’t change the fact that in the early stages of community development it really does feel like you are talking to yourself since you are co-located with most of your existing community members.
So, what can you do to kickstart a community? How do you attract people from outside your initial community?
There are two answers to this. The first is applicable to most of us – not a great deal other than the hard work. The second answer is only applicable to those with with pots of money.
I assume the majority of our readers do not have pots of money, so I’m afraid you are stuck with the hard work. Build your community infrastructure and make sure your environment is welcoming and useful for your users. OSS Watch can help you here, although you will need to have the project to attract users.
If you are lucky enough to have pots of money you have another option. You still need to set up a community infrastructure, you still need to create a welcoming environment and your outputs still need to be useful. However, you can use a couple of tricks to create activity around your project. For example, you can create an awards scheme in which people get a chunk of money, with no strings attached, to do work related to your project. For example, IBM have just announced the UIMA Innovation Awards, which is part of a larger set of awards.
The nice thing about this kind of award programme is that it is available to the rest of us working on projects that are in some way related. The goal of these award schemes is to build links between projects. So, why not take a look, maybe your project should be building links with the UIMA project (and being paid to do it).
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