Continuous Delivery Foundation cdCon 2022, 24 Jun 2022

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From YouTube: How to Grow and Mentor an Open Source Community & Achieve Collaboration with Over 170... Trista Pan

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For more Continuous Delivery Foundation content, check out our blog: https://cd.foundation/blog/

How to Grow and Mentor an Open Source Community & Achieve Collaboration with Over 170 Listed Corporations - Trista Pan, SphereEx

Having gone from being a woman developer in the open source world to CTO, didn't simply mean a change in her title. This journey included growing an open source community from just a handful of contributors, to one of the leading communities in China and fastest growing Apache projects in the world. The secret? True openness and inclusiveness, the willingness to both mentor students by collaborating with initiatives such as Google Summer of Code, while fostering a technically sound community whose solution has been adopted by over 170 publicly listed corporations. Juan Pan will share her empowering journey and valuable experience of being the CTO at an open source commercial start-up, how women in tech can turn the challenges they face into opportunities, and best practices for open source project leadership. Tune in to get inspired to think big, leave your mark and pursue your dream.

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Hello, everyone uh happy to here to give this talk about how to rent and mentor open source project or community, because in my previous talks that people will ask that how can make my open source community have a good reputation and or how to create a reputation.

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So today, if you have this talk, I got that can give you some answers about that question.

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uh Here is something about myself: I'm the chief japan, the co-founder and cto of sophia ex, so my area and professional, it's about distributed database development and database and management and platform development.

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Apart from that, I I get involved in a lot in apache software foundation and open source, because I'm the apache member and incubator mentor. So now I mentor three and mentoring three incubator projects and give some guiding or help to their open source project and community.

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Sometimes I will write some articles around such stuff. So if you interested in such stuff welcome to give a look on my twitter and linking alright. So let's get started with today's content, and this page is so important because that's the key point of today's talk.

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First, it's about a maturity model from apache software foundation, that's a great framework to evaluate and how mature of a open source project or community or if a way want to evaluate or judge a community.

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We need some indexes or need some like principles, so this mature model gave you this framework, give you some principles to help you to look at or review your open source, community or project like independence, consensus building, especially code and the community about the people or participants and quality around your document or your program, your project, about the release and about the license of copyright, especially your project. It's a business friendly license or not. So it's a over row um a principal or framework for you to evaluate open or project so based on this framework.

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If we want to reach that principle or get that goal, we need to have some approaches or masses. So the right part, it's the other approaches or the important parts I think to create a mature open source community.

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So today I will give a explanation and introduction on each part to make you to make it much clearer to you yeah. So today I will take a participating sofia, for example, to give some cases or give some examples to uh evidence that what I saw before or that's the mind, mapping it's valuable or useful for you to create your open source project, apache short in sofia. First, we need to look at his value over his slogan.

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Definition, it's an ecosystem to transfer any databases, it's my goal in the future into a distributed database system and enhance the system with the sharding, elastic and scaling encryption features and more in the future. So this definition is to tell our users at what's the value or what's the issue this project can help you solve is so important. I will give more introduce later on and then we will see other status around this community from the github.

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You thought that this project received nearly 16 000 stars there and have forks for nearly more than 5 000 forks and also have 318 country contributors in this community and have been released for 47 times. So you can see it's actually a very active and big community from the zero star and to this the start in this page we actually uh persisted doing for more than five years in this process.

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Actually, I I found that there are some of the module or the uh important keys and can be picked up for other uh similar open source project. First, we need to consider okay, okay, all right. So there is another part about this community, this honor that and because it's active and many people want to use it.

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So you will see this project in different channels or media like thin set landscape and the also it re it got the tension from the vc foundation and also you can see here the infrared cue it's talking about this project and we also have some talks on different conference uh yeah yeah. So now we can see the readout of the uh efforts and the time from the whole community, it's the honor, but it's also identified that we really did a lot of correct things to get this readout the first.

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The correct things is to evalua, evaluate your community or find the key points or key values of your project.

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That's the foundation for everything, for your open source project, because people need to know that, for example, if you want to give attention to one per chat or give to give attention to the product, that means you need it. You become interested.

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So if you can help user to solve the concerns or issues they really care about, then they are more willing to join here. To give you feedback to become the contribution to this community.

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But if your projects have no values or have no specific values, then people will have a lot of alternatives for the similar products in this area. Right, for example, there is a product- I guess most people are using this project that in the diagram or right diagram, it's had some very large community.

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Most of the users use this window for bird debt. So why? Because first most people have the needs to draw their like a charcoal or mind mapping or diagram, so they need this such tools to help them solve their specific issues.

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The second one that, because most people most of the people, join this community to give their feedback and they gradually this project evolved from maybe at the beginning you only have two features functions, but gradually more more and more people join here, give the feedback and their maintainers really to absorb such suggestions and make it stronger. So it's it's make. This community become sustainable right. So that's what I want to say. First, you need to found the specific values of your project. That's the foundation for everything. Second, the higher the value.

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That means the bigger the community could become in the future, especially if it can solve most of the people's issues and concerns, and also you need to consider the future values as per jet.

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If this purchase cannot grow up along with the time, then one day people found, we don't need it and then the community will die in the future. From apache software foundation. There is a group called an attic. That means, if nobody use this project or no one want to maintain it, then this protest will be moved to the attic.

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So that's important all right. So the next okay, so if you have a successful open source, that means you also can have some opportunities to have your commercial product or you can have creative or start up companies. Sophia, yes, is powered by a participating sofia, because you have your very active community. That's we can have. We can't get the attention from the vc sport all right. The next part is about to create infrastructure for your community and the further that I have to say that different language have different and user bases.

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We can look at the statistics here that most use the programming language among the developer worldwide right. So, if, when you have, when you open source projects, you also need to consider which coding or programming language is best for you. If this programming language have no big majority of users, that means it cannot call for many people here to give their help to help this project to grow up. But if this language, this programming language, have a lot of users using it or for that means it have an ecosystem.

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Many users or developers can create many basic or the modules or tools. For this ecosystem, you can create your project based on all the basic wonderful models to have to put your new initiative idea into this this foundation. So that's the uh values or benefit from active language programming language. Also, if there are so many developers familiar with language, they can really help this community to make it have more wonderful features. So it's very important and next one it's about how to quickly sign up your project.

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I recommend github, although they didn't give me any promotion fee, but I I recommend it because uh the github it's like uh it's, it's provide many like a workflow or the git tool and the page statics tools and also github actions to help you can one comment or just by using a configuration to quickly set up your project, it's so great and last part it's about. You also need to like create your code base test workflow on github or other similar wonderful platform to create this foundation for your project.

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The next part, it's about the code, conduct article or contribution guide. That's all means the document. I know that the most of the founders of the open source project are developers so for the developers they prefer focusing more attention on their coding on programming and gave less attention and care about their documents, but there. But I have to remind me, remind you that is so important.

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uh I can give example so first documents, because we all of us have limited efforts and times right. We cannot to introduce to everyone about this project, so we need a document to make this new commerce to learners project by themselves. That's so important, and second one about the article or or the uh contributing contribution guide. That means, first, if you have so uh so many documents or guidelines.

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That means the google can bring more traffic to your website and the newcomer come here and he found that he can learn more about this project. If they want to do some contribution, they also have the guide to help them to from the to switch their role from the user to the contributor.

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But if there are no guide, they really want to do something here, but they don't know how or where they can start ways. So it's important, the last part is about milestone or plan or code conduct.

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That means because, okay, it's a community, that means many developers or contributors will stay here and different people have their different coding practice or programming habits or their different ideas. If we have no benchmark or baseline for them or have no rules or guidelines for them to pick up. That means this community will become the chaos community and there is no framework help them put their idea in this role. Might so that's why I said document is so important all right, so I can give some examples from a participating sofia community.

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You can see here we have the blogs and we also do some translations and we welcome all of the users to write something to write the experience or the thoughts about this project, and then we help them to propose it and collected them here. So a newcomer can learn more from this blog from this post. From this article and for the writers they feel better, because this community helped them to promote their experience. The ideas, that's the double way right.

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Okay, so last part, when you talk about the people, people, that's because your community is not just a coding document. They also need the people here to help to create this community right. If this city only have the infrastructure, but no one here- nobody is here, then this community, it will become the dyed community right. So we need to attract more people's attention. We need to like encourage people to stay here, so how actually?

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This topic is related to psychology I have to I have said before: open source community, it's a mini company right, so how to make your employee or these contributors feel happy feel uh motivated to stay here to give their effort time here, that's so important, so how okay? I can give some thoughts about this topic. Actually, if I extend this topic, oh, I need to spend 14 minutes to stay to state more about that part. But there are some key part key point here: the first create the hierarchy of this community.

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Why, uh first for this community, it's the attribute of this community, the user? It has a majority right and then you have many of the contributors here. Contributor means they like they just just read the 1pr or field pr right, the next level, it's the committer.

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That means they really paid a lot of time and help this community grow up and do a lot of coding program here. So they know more about this project. That means people will more believe what they cite. I mean what what the commuter side, because they are professional than the contributor or the others in general and for pmc project management committee. They have more responsibility to help ranch community and give their suggestions around this community.

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So, generally pmc will receive more attention from the uh community from the users or contributors or committers this founder or this committee. They really have the more knowledge about this community.

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So if you have this hierarchy, then people will know, for example, a committer, a contributor ethic being their contributor, but gradually they pay a lot of time here they found they are voted to become the commuter they feel. They're encouraged motivated by the community, therefore, they found that what they paid or what they taken are saw seen by the whole community.

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So we found oh, I'm so happy to see this readout. I receive more respect and expectation from the community from more people's. So I'm more willing to give more time here then gradually they will have the belongings here. That means they really want to stay here right. So that's why it's just that you need to create this hierarchy. You need some specific process process for them like a voting, contributor meeting or commuter voting or pmc voting. These specific actions will make them feel like.

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Oh I'm so valuable here that the community need us right, okay, uh but for this community for these committers or contributors, they also receive a lot of uh or get a lot of from this community. First, they can practice their skills here right. They can gather connection with the right person that can make their resume look so great and also they can receive a lot of respect and encourage from others.

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So that's why they stay here. It's the double wing, okay, so the next part is about the promotion and cooperation. Oh, that are many cases I want to give more, but I have no time so. Let's ignore it! The next part about the participants or the cooperation with other.

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It's so so important to the. Why? Because, okay, you have a beautiful garden and the garden have a lot of different virus and flowers or trees there, it's so beautiful, but if you don't tell others, that's that that there is a wonderful garden, then people have no chance to visit so promote it or have the cooperation with other community then can help your garden be seen be known by more and more people from the world right.

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So that's why we uh we participate the stat, overflow podcast and write a lot of articles on different media, uh for example, info q, okay. So we also have some voting process to invite more people to join here, and we also like here have some cooperation with other big communities and we can like co uh host some cool meetup or do some code development that that that means other big community will know your community right and what you cite or what you did will be seen by the participants from other community organization conference right.

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So that also means you need more people here to help you to do some promotion, because if a community is healthy, it's active. That means you need more different type of people here to help this community grow up.

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Maybe someone just to write some articles, someone just to give some talks, someone just do some codings, although what they did will become, will merge together and make this community become beautiful, all right so also, we will encourage our end users to write their user cases or contain to write some articles about how they use this project and what is thinking about this project, etc?

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That's why we receive a lot of partnership here. The the last statement- I want to say that is persistence. It's the oh, it's so so important here, because it's the crucial point for the community. I know at the beginning. Actually there are so many projects similar with our participating sofia. We share the same functions and features, but today I found most of them die and no, no one will give this project more.

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Maintaining work were take part in the their activities or conference because most of the maintainers of their founders of such groups or community gave up. There are many reason why they give up. For example, they change their job. They don't want to do such stuff or they think it's unvaluable for their career for their life, where they lose the interest in this community.

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A lot of different excuse, ravens, but if you can persist to do it, this open source community for four two or three years. That means actually you proceed the other similar projects or competitors. Then you really maintain a successful community until now yeah. So I hope everyone can have them and persist doing such stuff and have the motivation and the interest in your community in your projects and help this community become stronger and become healthier and become active all right. So thanks for everyone, any question about that part. Welcome your any suggestion or questions.