Safe as Milk

Community Software Development training course

For the past few months, I have been offering a new service – a training course tailored to helping a team be effective working with community projects – whether that is engaging an existing community, or growing a community around new code. Details of the topics I cover are up on my site. Developing software in community is as much a social activity as it is a technical activity – and engaging an existing community, like moving into a new neighbourhood or starting at a new school, can be very daunting indeed. This course covers not just the technical issues of community development, but also the social, management and strategic issues involved. Some of the questions that I try to help answer are:

• What are the tools and communication norms?
• How can I get answers to my questions?
• Is there a trick to writing patches that get reviewed quickly?
• How do I figure out who’s in charge?
• How much will it cost me to open source some code/to work with an existing project?
• How does managing volunteers work?
• Is there anything I can do to help my developers be more vocal upstream?
• What legal issues should my developers be aware of?

All of these things, in my experience, are challenges that organisations have to overcome when they start engaging with community projects like Apache, GNOME or the Linux kernel.

If you’re having trouble with these issues, or some subset of them, and are interested in a training seminar, please contact me, and we’ll talk.