community building

See the following -

3 Metrics To Measure Your Open Source Community Health

Community building is table stakes in the success of any open source project. Even outside of open source, community is considered a competitive advantage for businesses in many industries—from retail, to gaming, to fitness. (For a deeper dive, see "When community becomes your competitive advantage" in the Harvard Business Review.) However, open source community building—especially offline activities—is notoriously hard to measure, track, and analyze. While we've all been to our fair share of meetups, conferences, and "summits" (and probably hosted a few of them ourselves), were they worth it? Did the community meaningfully grow? Was printing all those stickers and swags worth the money? Did we collect and track the right numbers to measure progress? To develop a better framework for measuring community, we can look to a different industry for guidance and fresh ideas: political campaigns.

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5 Keys to Hacking Your Community. What Works?

One of the many great keynotes given at the Community Leadership Summit (CLS) this year was by Rod Martin of Mautic, creator of marketing automation software. Rod spoke to us about the five key secrets to growth hacking your community. If you're like me, you might be wondering what growth hacking is? Growth hacking is a fancy way to say throwing everything against the wall to see what sticks / works. Rod's talk stuck with me because he presented his argument by using a series of words and definitions to make it completely clear what it is we're trying to do when building our communities...

A Doctor Leverages Open Source to Learn How to Code And Improve Medical Care in Africa

Judy Gichoya is a medical doctor from Kenya who became a software developer after joining the open source medical records project, OpenMRS. The open source project creates medical informatics software that helps health professionals collect and present data to improve patient care in developing countries. After seeing how effective the open medical records system was at increasing efficiency and lowering costs for clinics in impoverished areas of Africa, she began hacking on the software herself to help improve it. Then she set up her own implementation in the slums outside Nairobi, and has done the same for dozens of clinics since. This is a classic story of open source contributors, who join in order to scratch an itch. But Gichoya was a doctor, not a programmer. How did she make the leap?

How Community Building Can Help an Organization's Bottom Line

In this article, I'll look at community from a business perspective, including the effect community can have on an organization's bottom line. Although there are communities everywhere, I'll approach the topic—meaning, communities, their members, and their contributors—from a free/open source perspective. So please stick around, and maybe you'll learn ways to communicate the importance of community to your organization...