Symptom of poor positioning: Stagnant communities

There are a lot of things that go into growing an open source community. One of my favorite descriptions of building a robust open source community is this story of how Drupal grew to massive size (and the related company, Acquia, also grew and made boatloads of money). One thing I noticed Drupal founder Dries Buytaert talking about is ‘converting’ users into contributors. I think that’s the exact right word, by the way, because time is the currency of open source communities, and becoming a contributor means trading something of value to support the project.

If you have an open source project and are struggling to either attract new users or to convert users to contributors, it could be a positioning problem. In this case, though, there could be tons of other problems, too, so this is a symptom that you’d have to dive into more to see if positioning is the problem. However, if you’re:

  • Providing a welcoming environment that makes it easy for new contributors to contribute

  • Actively marketing the project

  • Following other open source best practices like robust documentation

And you’re still struggling with a stagnant community, it is definitely worth considering whether a positioning disconnect could be getting in the way of community growth.

Emily Omier