1. The secrets of building
an Open Source community
Dries Buytaert
Founder and project lead Drupal
Co-founder and CTO Acquia
http://buytaert.net :: http://acquia.com
@Dries on Twitter
2. Meet Dries Buytaert
• founded Drupal
• co-founded Acquia
• co-founded Mollom
• President Drupal Association
• likes photography
• holds a PhD in CS
23. Drupal is Open Source
1. Freedom to run the program
2. Freedom to study the program
3. Freedom to modify the program
4. Freedom to re-distribute the program
24.
25. There is a lot of (administrative) overhead associated
with testing and deploying proprietary software
54. Dries’ five “secrets” for
building a community
1. Provide the right tools
2. There is no quick rich formula
3. Hurray for growing pains
4. Make money but pay with trust
5. Leadership trumps management
60. Dries’ five “secrets” for
building a community
1. Provide the right tools
2. There is no quick rich formula
3. Hurray for growing pains
4. Make money but pay with trust
5. Leadership trumps management
62. Meet Dries 11 years ago when he started work on Drupal ...
Student dorm in Antwerp
where I started Drupal
Assembly books
Chess board
Collection of stamps
Compiler books
All furniture is from IKEA
63. Drupal 1.0.0 released
on January 15, 2001
Today, drop.org announces the release of Drupal 1.00 after an
extensive period of testing. Drupal is a full-featured content
management/discussion engine using Apache/PHP/MySQL and suitable
to setup a news-driven community or portal site similar to
kuro5hin.org and slashdot.org. Current features include discussion
forums, web-based administration, theme support, an open submission
queue, content management, a modularized design, PHP sessions, user
management with access control and username/profanity/hostname
filters, error logging, a public diary module, an affiliate site module,
backend/headline generation (RSS/RDF) and much more.
67. Dries’ five “secrets” for
building a community
1. Provide the right tools
2. There is no quick rich formula
3. Hurray for growing pains
4. Make money but pay with trust
5. Leadership trumps management
73. Dries’ five “secrets” for
building a community
1. Provide the right tools
2. There is no quick rich formula
3. Hurray for growing pains
4. Make money but pay with trust
5. Leadership trumps management
76. Dries’ five “secrets” for
building a community
1. There is no quick rich formula
2. Hurray for growing pains
3. Provide the right tools
4. Make money but pay with trust
5. Leadership trumps management
79. Create an environment where everyone is
… a respected …and a dedicated
leader follower
80. Dries’ five “secrets” for
building a community
1. There is no quick rich formula
2. Hurray for growing pains
3. Provide the right tools
4. Make money but pay with trust
5. Leadership trumps management
- If you look under the hood, it is actually surprising how communities work and innovate\n- Just like this street-painting\n
- I’ve actually built a number of communities. Most significant one being Drupal. \n- We have a fantastic community with some really smart people.\n- In the remainder of this presentation, I want to talk a bit about lessons learned when building and growing the Drupal community\n- Apply them to your own community, but also in trying to work together\n\n
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Really the work of many people to get where we are today\nWould not have happened without the Drupal community\nPretty sure that is also true for Joomla! and the Joomla! community\nPlone and the Plone community\n
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Basic freedoms of Free Software encourage collaboration\nCollaboration encourage community\nDrupal started to win because of its community\n
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Really the work of many people to get where we are today\nWould not have happened without the Drupal community\nPretty sure that is also true for Joomla! and the Joomla! community\nPlone and the Plone community\n
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Yes and no.\n
It’s in people’s DNA to become part of communities ... working to our advantage\n
- Extract some lessons from what I learned.\n- Some of these things you might already know.\n- Certainly more than 5 secrets\n- Not really ‘secrets’ anyway\n- Still useful to line them up\n
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Cell phone example. Replace planning with coordination, just like with the cell phone, you become much more effective. Coordination built into our community and into our systems. We have to be careful we don’t create an institution. That we don’t institutionalize a problem. I feel strong about this, and I felt this all along. But for example, I never believed in traditional roadmaps, I never believed in creating many teams or hierarchies, and I never believed that the Drupal Association should be in control over our technical direction. Let people self-organize and solve the problems when they emerge. Companies that don’t have community today will need to figure this out, even if they are closed source.\n
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Drupal.org is running Drupal\n1M members\nHave a lot of tools to allow members to self-organize\nHave a lot of processes to make decisions and tools to help with that\n\n
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5 years after starting Drupal, and 5 years from today -- smack in the middle\nAmazed\n
Sheraton\nWe’d love to have some people from the PHP community present\n
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Growing up is learning to deal with bigger problems\n
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10k in donations in just a couple of days\nOSL offered free hosting\nCTO of Sun shipped a server\nCrazy!\n
- Milestone in community building\n- Early signs of what a strong community we have and that we were building something remarkable\n- Joint suffering\n- Turn pain points into assets\n
Also has some frustrations, they couldn’t always understand why things were the way they were\n\n
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Almost all successful projects backed by companies, and backed by people that make a living of the software\n
- Money drives a lot of innovation\n- Those with a lot of trust make the decisions -- currency\n- Build bridges, spread love by transferring some trust onto others. Just like money in the real world\n- Empower others. Invite them in. Set them up for success.\n\n
- Ecosystem is key, but make sure it is based on trust\n
Important difference\n
Find a higher purpose. Vision. Fight a good fight. It shows passion. \nIt creates something that a community can rally behind. \nIt is something your customers can rally behind.\nDemocratize online publishing. Allowing people to share. Allowing people to connect. Non-technical people, assemble a powerful website.\nDrupal 7 much easier -- won’t be the Drupal you knew, DrupalGardens.com hosted service with a free version\n\n
Very little structure in the Drupal community\nGovernance for managing conflicts and making decisions\nSelf-organize, can take the lead in making things happen\n
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Bonus secret\nStarted Drupal, no master plan\n\n
If you do all of that, we can make the difference between ...\n
