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
Do your homework first. Be excellent to each other. Always good bits of advice for joining any new community.
Key factors in most open source communities are governance and relationships.
- Most people participating there are doing it by choice, or if they're doing it for a job, it's in an indirect relationship with the project. So you need to respect the time and interests of open source communities more than in most other organizations (especially typical corporations, where bosses just tell you what to do).
- Long term project contributors often identify personally with their favorite projects. So how the respond to newcomers - especially ones that aren't respectful or polite - can often seem harsh. For some contributors, it's not just an "office" space you're emailing into, it's also part of their home, and their personal community of friends.
Good luck all, and thanks for the out of this world book recommendation.
Projects can mentor new contributors as well. How your project as a whole presents itself and provides onramps for newcomers to the technology and the project community is critical to helping people step up on the broader scale.
That in no way obviates the need for personal mentoring - but individual mentors can only do so much, no matter how big your community is. Having a friendly face to your project can also help new people step up - and once they do, perhaps they'll find some new friends and potential mentors in your community.