Community Leadership Summit

Community Leadership Summit, San Jose, July 18-19 2009.

A so-called unconference and the brainchild of Jono Bacon of Ubuntu fame, it brought together community leaders, managers, aficionado from across the software and computer industry as well as a few others like the music industry. A great opportunity to meet with like-minded spirits and reconnect with ex-colleagues and friends.

As it was an unconference the sessions and discussions were very much whatever we wanted them to be: for example Saturday’s schedule. Each morning at the plenary session people would stand up and give short descriptions of the topics they were proposing. This could be whatever one wanted to talk about, ranging from “Quality Assurance in communities” to “How do you describe what you do?” (the difficulty of explaining your job to your parents, a familiar problem).

In this style of conference sessions are very much discussions. You sit in a group and the group very much dictates where the topic goes. Couple of my favorite sessions covered how to balance the interests of the F/OSS community at large versus the corporate interests of the community owner, how to build your user/developer community and finding metrics that matter. These and other sessions had common recurring themes – two specifically that I want to explore here further: the science of community is still relatively new, and community should be looked at as business as usual.

To start with the latter, this came up in the “FOSS community & business” session led by Louis Suarez on Saturday, in “Building your user (developer) community” moderated by Pati Dock on Sunday, and in “Metrics that matter” also on Sunday. In the first session OpenOffice.org was discussed to some extent. Sun started this effort not necessarily to build market share in the software productivity market but more to cause some distraction (perhaps just PR-wise) for Microsoft. While this motivation may be a little tough on individuals (and Sun’s employees) participating in that community, I believe from the corporate perspective this is a legitimate reason to start and run such an effort. The key aspect being that senior management has a clear understanding of the purpose. In any case community leader will continuously need to educate and reconfirm his or her company of the community’s mission and its value to the company. There will always be tension between functions such as sales and those active in the community.

In the second session an argument I made was that expanding your community involves a lot of rather traditional marketing and outreach: understand your developers (they are your customers), understand where potential new developers hang out, how to reach them, understand what they want/need, and make it as easy as possible for them to join in. Maybe you’ll want to adjust the specific language used but much of the toolbox stays the same: understanding you market and your competitors. Sara Ford of Microsoft’s Codeplex effort spoke about grass roots approaches I deploy as well: hang out with user groups and talk with them about their wishes, desires and frustrations are and ask how you can help.

The “FOSS community & business” and “Metrics that matter” sessions showed that software communities are still a relatively new science: How do you present to the company’s senior management that your community is successful? What is success? How do you measure it? These are surprisingly difficult questions to answer. For many communities this is because at launch goals are either not well-defined or they are disputed within the company. Certainly a few of the Java communities I have been involved in suffer thus. If we look at open source software communities (eg OpenSolaris, Apache Software Foundation, Eclipse, OpenOffice, OpenJDK) very few are set up for charity’s sake. In almost all cases the founder(s) will have some business or commercial goal in mind. This may be to break into new markets or to break open an existing market, to undercut, hinder or distract a competitor, to expand distribution but eventually the community is intended to achieve something that contributes directly or indirectly to someone’s bottom line. Giving something away for free is expensive, someone will want a return on that investment at some point. So, how do you measure success and how do you present that return on investment to senior management?

This is where things get tricky. Seldom will a community have goals articulated that can be directly measured. While there are similarities a software community is not a magazine for which we can measure subscriptions, content contributions, ad sales and ad impact, and then charter employees to drive each aspect and present a combined dashboard that shows the health and growth of the magazine’s business. In many cases the goals the company has for a community are more esoteric and you are left with numbers that you can measure that at best indirectly track goal achievement. This has two main risks: you get the community you measure, and you over-rotate on a particular number (say downloads) because it can be driven. To give a non-community specific example: many customer service departments are measured on time spent on each customer incident (and driving that number down) because that can be easily tracked instead of customer satisfaction (and driving that up) which is much harder to quantify.

Some points of collective wisdom from the group discussion: carefully decide between the numbers you track and what you present to upper management, important to have clear goals and buy-in, track trends rather than specific numbers as trends are much harder to manipulate.

I felt there was another conclusion which I like to phrase as follows. We community-types often talk in too soft a language, giving justifications for community investment that are too esoteric or woolly when presenting internally. We need to learn to look at it and speak about it much more in traditional business language: if you invest this much, you’ll get that much out of it over these periods of time. One reason why this is so is because open source software as a business model is also still new. Many companies are discovering that there’s much more to the story than “give away your software for free and make it up in service and support.”

All in all this first edition of the event was a great success – what with about 200 attendees – and I hope it will become a yearly event. It is great to have this collective international wisdom on (software) communities in one spot. Next year I would love to see other, non-technology, communities such as Kiva attend and hear their experiences.