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"It's really the Drupal community and not the software that makes the Drupal project what it is. Fostering the Drupal community is actually more important than managing the code base."
Dries Buytaert, Drupal Project Lead
From the outside (and often times from within, too), the success of healthy open source projects defies all logic. Scores of individuals from all over the world, all of whom have different skill levels, use cases, experience, native languages, and time zones, collaborate together in order to help make a project succeed.
How is it that all of this chaos comes together and creates something wonderful and useful? What lessons can be taken from how open source projects work and applied to our practical, daily lives and organizations?
This article will attempt to extrapolate some of the experience gleaned from being immersed for over four years in the Drupal project (http://drupal.org). Drupal is an open source website building tool which has transformed from a small hobby project in 1999 to a robust framework powering hundreds of thousands of websites today. Behind the buzzwords "social publishing" and "content management framework" there lies a diverse, passionate, and vibrant global community. We present some of the key ingredients to the community's success, many of which can be applied to any organization.
Create a Great Community and Great Code Will Follow
The overriding mission for a healthy open source project is retaining and growing its base of contributors.
The label "contributor" applies not only to the project's developers, but also to those who report bugs, review fixes, answer support requests, design interfaces, provide translations, help with marketing and evangelism, and write and edit documentation. Contributors are the lifeblood of any open source project as they drive the project forward.
It is vital to establish a fundamental understanding within the community that each of these types of contributions is an integral part of the overall project's health. Many key individuals who are driving forces within open source projects got their start by fixing typos in documentation or answering other users' support questions. A culture that values a well-written tutorial as much as a wellwritten application programming interface (API) is much more likely to attract and retain newcomers than a culture that values seasoned developers,...