2.7 KiB
Open Community
The success of open source -as a concept, mindset and way of collaborative activities, such as software development-, lies within the community and the ecosystem around it.
This pillar of the Four Opens ensures an open and collaborative environment that is welcoming and inclusive to everyone who would like to participate. Whether you are one of the contributors or a person who supports a community, you need to work on making it a level playing field for everybody regardless of gender, race, company affiliation, and so forth. Everybody's actions count.
Every community that is bigger than a handful of people will form governance bodies that are responsible for the smooth and efficient operation of the group of people who work on to achieve their common goals and mission. In order to make your community an open environment everyone needs to have the opportunity to take on a leadership position or become part of any of the governing bodies. Processes, such as meritocracy-based leadership, are good examples to practice.
In order for people to be able to rise to become leaders within the community, they need to have access and be able to participate in the design and development process. We will discuss these principles in later sections of this document.
To make a community open and diverse, the participants need to define common goals and a mission that they will work on together. Goals and mission can evolve over time to follow the evolution of the project based on technology evolution, users' needs and contributors' ideas and innovations. The open environment, where all actors can equally participate, provides the possibility to create a feedback loop between those who work on the project and those, who are using it - either directly or by creating a service or offering based on the project.
The open and well documented communication channels will help you to establish good interaction between all participants. By creating and maintaining an equal environment for everyone with open and neutral governance you will encourage the community to become diverse as opposed to being controlled by a single company or organization.
In an ideal world users of the project also become contributors to your community, as their participation is invaluable to provide feedback and share their needs and channalenges the project is trying to solve.
To build and maintain an open community, everyone who participates and supports it needs to have an open and inclusive mindset with which they perform all actions and interactions. Furthermore, there are processes and actions to support this pillar of the Four Opens, which this document will discuss later.