Ohio Linuxfest 2009 - Building a Community around your Project - Jorge Castro

Jorge Castro of Canonical gives a very enlightening talk about building a community around the development of Gwibber, a client written in Python by Ryan Paul of Ars Technica for microblogging sites such as Twitter and Identica.

Some of the points Castro really drives home include:

• Recognizing what you as a developer are not good at and finding others to augment your skills
• Delegating tasks or authority to others to ease project stress/management
• Setting behavioral expectations for developers, contributors, and community participants
• Communicating intentions between developers and community, not just developers
• Establishing a roadmap for both the product and its community
• Choosing a popular platform which has its own community with help available
• Thinking of releases, schedules, and downstream distributors

One of the major points he drove home was regarding "tool wankery," in which developers spend more time worrying about or learning tools than actually developing a product. He stressed the importance of learning the tools, but not focusing on them.

BIOS LEVEL highly recommends this talk to any intrepid developer looking to start an any development project--closed source or open--and even some seasoned developers who need the occasional reminder of where they came from.

There are Ogg Theora and h264 versions at Blip.tv, plus a torrent of the 720p Ogg version. A special thanks to Jorge for recommending Blip.tv to BIOS LEVEL.