Building Thriving EcoSystems for Open Source

if you want to build a successful open source community, the best way is to not build in a walled garden you want to leverage a community of other open source projects, including those that might be adjacent or event competitive real quadrant provides complimentary digital engagement tools to open source projects to build out thriving communities to support these open source projects, we provide commerical open source or even closed source saas to provide education based content for a fee in order to reach open source developers and end users the key is being open to being truly open and ecosystem minded many open source projects are actually walled gardens put up on github the real way to succeed, however, is to drive engagement and involvement into a central "town square" where open source developers are able to gather what do we provide to open source projects free webinar infrastructure and replay hosting free docid\ zx43zvi7tx0xt02ioxzxe free cross community forum free hosting of lms for training free social media tracking via dashboards free ambassador program tracking and fulfillment (but community management needs to be paid for or provided on a volunteer basis) free surveying free blogging platform (you can make your own blog canonical and republish here) free podcast to drive awareness and traffic how do you get started? step 1 launch and promote a webinar to your existing list we'll provide you the hosting of webinar, and act initially as a host and interviewer for your project you drive traffic to attend the awesome webinar, which we can record, and put on replay we will then ask those who register to continue the discussion and ask questions in the community forum there will be a dedicated section for your project (you can work with us on taxonomy) why would you do this versus driving them to your own slack? for two reasons 1\) the forum will collect seo and support a virtual loop; attendees continue to engage around your project in the forum; new people who find the forum through seo can then engage with the evergreen webinar step 1 1 create a category and space in our forum we think being in a public square with multiple related projects, versus your own walled garden, is the best way to grow your community it feels counter intuitive, but owning a category in a place that's a "hub" for projects (which is basically what real quadrant is), and then linking back out to your own silos of content is fine but we really think if you keep content in a public square and link back to your project for the core work of downloading and contributing is the best approach to maximizing awareness and collaboration, and then narrowing back down into the actual code in your open source repository (such as github or gitlab) step 1 2 create a blog post we think it's better if you create a hub in our space to encourage cross linking across projects on our "neutral town square " this blog post should ideally be original content but you can also host on your blog, just keep this blog post as canonical (we don't support that, yet, so your post can be canonical) however, you can always cross link and even have a cta from the blog we host back to your project's website having a blog post which sets the stage for the webinar (why it's useful, code snippets you reference, a link out to the webinar registration and replay) before the webinar date gives you multiple ways to promote it and create linkable content i suggest that this "webinar announce" blog post ask for questions right in the forum it gets you better prepared for the webinar to make it relevant, increasing searchability, and then advances your content step 1 2 be a guest on our podcast we'll work to get it published and time promotion with other projects they'll promote their interview while you promote your interview the interview will be based a little bit on what you share in the webinar, but is meant to cast a much wider net for the audience we will provide a set of standard questions we use for the podcast https //www heavybit com/library/blog/so you want to start a show podcasting best practices/?mc cid=895e7723ca\&mc eid=2cb96b191b https //zencastr com/pricing step 2 tell us which open source projects compliment yours we will then reach out to those open source projects and ask to do the same thing host a webinar how do you come up with open source projects that compliment yours? upstream or downstream from you higher or lower in the stack from you integration partners step 3 social media evergreen real quadrant will also create an evergreen social presence, where we will also mention your handle and a link to your content as we encourage more followers of real quadrant twitter, this will be another source of amplification acorss the ecosystem that's it to jump start there are more things we can do with your community as we build out a repeatable flywheel webinars podcasts job boards ambassador service faq how are you offering these services for free? i am pooling the infrastructure costs across a bunch of open source projects as the open source projects pools their communities together, we offer paid services for the commercial offerings this may even include proprietary software vendors or saas why would i broadcast to my own list a webinar hosted with you? because i am asking the same of 10 different projects at the same time when your webinar is hosted with us, you will be exposed to the communities of the other projects even if we're in the early stages, you still benefit by having a third party interview and validate your market, and the link back to your site so will i get a ton of new developers immediately? the concept of the "public square" will be more gradual in the beginning we're building a central, neutral service for any open source project to teach and connect with developers as a "public square" we will be leveraging other communities and expose them to you it's less work (since the infrastructure is ready), lower costs (infrastructure is free), and more developers (by being the hub across all the other projects) but i have my own forum, why would i have convos on yours? because your own forum is captive they are people who are already part of your community and will always return there because that's where the deeper engagement is on the real quadrant forum, that's an outpost where you want activity which will bring people into your own forums this means you should hold ama's, tutorials, introductory content out in the "public square," but then provide links back into your community for going "in depth " being active in a "public square" makes people excited to join the party behind your walled garden! step 4 tap into our ambassador service we have an ambassador service which will allow you to reward developers for key actions with schwag set up fulfillment in our centralied schwag store, allocate budget for an initial run (20 shirts), and we can come up with rewards and fulfillment usually, we find the best things to reward are tutorials on youtube (which are then made available on our website and can be embedded into blogs) and blog posts the ambassador service simplifies the process of enlisting and rewarding ambassadors you can either pay for someone to run the community or, if you have someone already with that role, we can give you admin access