Name: Building Open Source Communities - Tierney Cyren - JSConf US 2019
Uploaded: 2020-03-28T16:11:53.000Z
Duration: 26 min 29 s
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Building Open Source Communities - Tierney Cyren

All right, so who's ready to hear about building open source communities?

>> All right, so let's welcome Tierney Cyren.

Could we give another round of applause to the organizers and the supporting staff who

have built this amazing event that I've really had an amazing time with and I hope you have

Awesome, OK, so today I want to talk about building open source communities.

Before I get started, I'm going to do a quick who am I.

My name is Tierney Cyren, my pronouns are he and him.

I work at Microsoft, I collaborate on the Node project and a number of other projects

in various different ways, that's basically what you need to know about me.

>> Open source is everything, or at least the community side of open source is everything

So everything that's not technical, like literally writing lines of code and consuming lines

This includes people, coordinating a bunch of different aspects of your community itself,

processes, location, funding, social media, blogging, diversity

and inclusivity, outreach, documentation, licensing, there's lot.

>> I think like a year and a half ago, I asked what open source community is.

And there was a bunch of different responses and they're all pretty good and honestly I

That said, they're all pretty different, and it kind of leads us to understand that there's

not consensus around what open source community is, because it's so individual to us as individual

contributors, to us as maintainers, to us as consumers.

You have to really take into account those aspects when you're asking like such a broad

Whatever technology you came from originally, whatever you started with, is going to influence

how you perceive an open source community.

Whatever your personal history is going to influence how you see a community in general

and then you are aapplying open source definition to that of what's important to you.

Again differentiate how you'd perceive an open source community so everyone's idea is

So taking that, how do you actually build an open source community?

It's kind of challenging, but it's also very easy in a lot of ways.

I generally try not to say easy, but it's -- I'm using it in in this case, because it's

easy to stumble into it and do it accidentally and this is how a lot of communities do end

So I'm using easy very intentionally there.

Every open source community has a lot of its own quirks and unique aspects and often those

are really good and often those can be really bad.

Luckily, there are some fundamental traits, at least in my experience of the open source

communities I've been a part of that are shared and these aren't necessarily like I can give

These are kind of cultural things that are shared and kind of manifest no matter how

you get to open source community evolves and builds up.

So let's go into some of the lessons I've personally learned from being parts of open

source communities and helping them grow and also seeing them fail.

So these are the communities I participated in.

It was created in 2006, I think, 2005, which for me is a long time.

It's PHP, so you know, very different from JavaScript that we're used to, and kind of

the build speed was a very different pace than what we're used to in JavaScript.

Tent was a protocol, the implementation was Ruby.

So Tent was very much an idea and a definition similar to what HTTP is, people go implement

T very interesting community and one that I really loved and very sad to have seen it

Io.js, I assume many of you know what that is, but that is the fork of node that happened

Eventually got merged into Node.js and got moved under Node.js foundation.

I do absolutely classify them as two different communities and two different experiences.

Creating too much structure can be a really bad thing that hinders your community.

Specifically it sets guardrails on how your community can grow and sets implicit expectations

about that growth, and it limits what you can do once you begin getting momentum, because

people try to stay within those guardrails rather than doing something natural and probably

something that you're not going to expect.

So my experience in MyBB was I created a website called techno board.net: It was a forum for

people who were interested in technology.

And I built a lot of structure, because that's how all of the forums I saw were doing it.

There were two forums that had a bunch of posts and al.

Rests were empty and that creates an environment where oh, I see a bunch of empty things, this

looks dead and so I'm not going to participate.

So defining those guide rails and setting up structure when it's not needed yet is actually

really challenging because it one, makes your community look empty, and two, it limits how

So yeah, that's an example of how to do something that's maybe not the best, because you're

trying to do, and you're trying to mimic what others do, and that can hamper your actual

Additionally, in Node, going through the process of creating a PR and submitting it, and, you

know, getting it merged and going through the entire process can be a little bit cumbersome

and can kind of feel like this, where it's just a cycle, and you know, certain groups

in Node have gotten a lot better about this.

That said, this process is also very intentional.

We do this because it's needed in a lot of cases.

Node is a very highly impactful project, and making sure that we're not letting things

slip through that shouldn't be slipping through is really important, because we don't want

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Building Open Source Communities - Tierney Cyren - JSConf US 2019

perceive

eventually

individual

process