Building Community

Joe Brockmeier, the community manager for Novell's openSUSE, has an interesting blog post entitled "Herding cats for fun and profit: Four tips for working with online communities". His four tips include:

1. Don’t start a conversation you can’t keep up.


2. Plan to act on feedback.


3. Have an open process. When making decisions, planning features, working on code, and so forth, you need to have a process that’s as transparent as possible.


4. Bad news is better than no news.

More tips for building community can be found in the summary of the OSBR article "Community Building: NetBSD in Hindsight".