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the-open-source-contributor-funnel.md

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THE OPEN SOURCE CONTRIBUTOR FUNNEL

Mike McQuaid, @mikemcquaid, GitHub (Homebrew maintainer)

In which Mike butchers sales metaphors 😆

  • group your users
    • users
      • no interaction with you
    • contributors
      • some level of interaction, contributed (detailed) issues
      • may submit PRs, no commit access
    • maintainers
      • commit access
      • interact with community
      • gatekeepers, setting direction of project
  • the funnel
    • leads -> prospects -> sales
    • users -> contributors -> maintainers
    • Homebrew: 10 active maintainers, 20 over entire lifetime
    • Contributors 1%, maintainers ~.002% (maybe, but Math)
      • This is a decent ratio for the industry
  • upsell
    • How to push someone deeper into the funnel
    • Turn a user into a contributor:
      • E.g. tell them how to open an issue, how to turn a bad issue into a good one (text expander snippet)
      • Push them towards making a PR, point them to docs that walk them through the process, document your project, don’t assume people know how to use Git, GitHub, know how to code
    • Turn contributor into a maintainer (someone who has made consistently high quality contributions to the project):
      • New maintainer checklist
  • retain
    • How will the project attract / repel [users|contributors|maintainers]?
    • Users
      • Care about the project working
      • High quality (maintain quality of project)
      • No guilt merges (don’t merge out of guilt, if the quality just isn’t there)
      • No v2.0 (in Homebrew, ethos of no 2.0, i.e. no rewrite, high likelihood of bugs, regressions, missing features introduced by a 2.0)
    • Contributors
      • No bikeshedding (low barrier of entry to engagement, conversations people can contribute to)
      • Mailing list / IRC
      • no feature issues / requests (contentious, Homebrew policy, chances are it won’t get built)
    • Maintainers
      • Code of conduct (hold people accountable to it)
      • Private chat (important to have safety, avoid sense of 5,000 people watching)
      • Always growing (have enough capacity to allow people to take a break)

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Tue Jun 28 15:27:19 PDT 2016