Building a community around software is an important step for its sustainability. This guide is for researchers, developers and managers of a software product that has started to gain a community. This guide will discuss how to increase your community and encourage contributions from it.

The ultimate goal of community building is to nurture an active supporting community. An active community can become self-supporting: answering queries raised by community members and contributing new functionality and bug fixes back to your project. This gives you more time to develop your software and reduces the resources needed to sustain it. In this way, a community can help you make your software more useful to more people. 

Why is community building important? 

Software has a distinct lifecycle. As software matures, the way it is developed and people’s expectations will change. One of the significant steps occurs when your software becomes a viable product rather than just a project. Indicators of this change include having funding from more than one source, spending a larger proportion of time on support than on new development, having many active users outside your direct collaborators, and having users who are willing to contribute back to your project. 

Why to change what I’m doing?

The widening of your user community means that you need to consider different ways of harnessing the growing set of users. Your community could stagnate if you don’t reassess the way it is run and supported. This could include changing the way you govern your project and the way you develop your software. 

When your community begins to grow, it may begin to determine the future direction of your software, and this direction may not have been in your initial plan.

How to help your fledgling software?

Ensuring you are directly involved in your software's reception is the key.

Engage your community

Actively seek feedback from as many sensible routes as possible. Along with mailing lists, consider user surveys, end-user groups drawn from the community, exhibits and demos, hackathons, newsletters and videos.

Some of the best feedback comes from watching users as they use your software, so spending time with your community is important. 

Even poor feedback is helpful

Some of the best advice can be the advice you don’t want to hear. Find out what really matters to your community and act on it, even if you feel that the issues raised are not the most important or interesting. It is important not to lead the community too much - you need to elicit their views, rather than just get them to answer your questions. Get back to community members and ask them to expand on their answers to survey questions. 

Allow others to help

Try to lower barriers to contribution. Part of the community will form the base of your extended development team, so the more people you have contributing, the greater the pool of potential developers. Get rid of obstacles. Examine the governance and licensing models to ensure that it is clear how people can contribute.

Make it easy to build on your code by refactoring your architecture to provide clear extension points – this will also encourage reuse. Review your documentation regularly and make sure that it is clear and up to date. And always remember to give credit for contributions, no matter how small!

What do the professionals do?

Professional software companies invest a lot of work into understanding their market and the users who form their community. Different mechanisms for engagement are used, from websites, mailing lists and discussion forums, to more formal methods such as setting up User Groups, early access/beta tester programmes and software ambassador schemes.

These methods can be very successful at nurturing an active community of users, but care should be taken with some of the more involved methods which can take relatively high levels of effort to run well.

What to do when your software is finally launched? 

The ultimate goal of community building is to nurture an active supporting community that can answer queries and contribute back to the project. This might reduce the amount of control you have over the project, but it pays off: you will have a more robust and flexible development team, which will be less centralised. It also means that the software is in tune with the needs of its community, leading to wider and increased reuse. 

Further information and useful resources

• A pdf of the corresponding briefing paper
• OSS Watch - How to build a community
• OSS Watch Software Sustainability Maturity Model
• Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project, Karl Fogel