Shane is founder of Punderthings℠ LLC consultancy, helping organizations find better ways to engage with the critical open source projects that power modern technology and business. He blogs and tweets about open source governance and trademark issues, and has spoken at major technology conferences like ApacheCon, OSCON, All Things Open, Community Leadership Summit, and Ignite.
Shane Curcuru serves as VP Brand Management for the ASF, wrote the trademark and branding policies that cover all 200+ Apache® projects, and assists projects with defining and policing their trademarks, as well as negotiating agreements with various software vendors using Apache software brands. Shane is serving a seventh term as an elected Director of the ASF, providing governance oversight, community mentoring, and fiscal review for all Apache projects.
Otherwise, Shane is: a father and husband, a BMW driver and punny guy. Oh, and we have cats! Follow @ShaneCurcuru and read about open source communities and see my FOSS Foundation directory.
Authored Comments
Given that this is part of the Apache Quill series, does anyone else notice that mentions of "Apache" before the various project names here are few and far between?
The best practice is to use the full Apache Hadoop form of the name in the first and most prominent uses on any page.
Content wise, good stuff. "Hadoop" is such a misunderstood term that it's important to get people to think about *how* they're actually going to implement big data-whatever - and these are some of the other key projects that help you with that.
Thanks for your comment! You're exactly right - trying to improve your project's brand, or the way it presents itself to the rest of the world is key to trying to draw in new contributors.
There are two parts to this: reach and interest. Working on reach - actually getting your message out to the world - can be hard, but you can do it with persistence and writing interesting content in different places.
Interest is harder. Open source is a great place to showcase new ideas. But there are so many new open source projects out there, you need to also have something interesting to draw people in. Explaining in simple ways how your product will solve user's problems for them is key - but there's often a limit to how many users actually have that specific problem. In particular, showing some companies ways that your software can solve their customer's problems is another way to gain contributors. A significant percent of all open source work - even in smaller projects - is done by company-paid engineers submitting code that they want to use for their business. If you can figure out a way to get some companies interested in your project for their own purposes, that can be good too. Just be sure you have clear licensing in place.
Thanks!
- Shane