Which communities to reach out to for anecdotes?

[aidanbudd]

Several issues were linked to ways of collecting examples/anecdotes from others re: their experiences working in OS scientific communities. To (hopefully) make it easier to work through this issue list, I'm closing some of them and linking to them here:

• Adding examples/experience/anecdotes from real communities to our collected features. #21 "Adding examples/experience/anecdotes from real communities to our collected features."
• Which kind of communities to include in discussion/examples? #18 "Which kind of communities to include in discussion/examples?"
• Collecting list of successful Open Source communities #13 "Collecting list of successful Open Source communities"
• Attracting more contributors #9 "Attracting more contributors"
• Revisit Data Carpentry, maybe? #15 "Revisit Data Carpentry, maybe?"

We've collected a list of potential communities to reach out to in a file in the repo: listOfOSBCs.md

I think it'd be good to work with a transparent, agreed-upon set of criteria, for deciding which ones to contact directly for their input, and that's been discussed already in several of these issues (and in the Hangouts).

Wanted to check we have consensus to this - please give your opinions on this, in particular letting us know if you agree/disagree with it.

• scope to include any scientific open-source communities - we assume that most of the relevant issues/features are common across all of them, and that we'll be biased towards bioinformatics, given our backgrounds (see issue Collecting list of successful Open Source communities #13)
• we want to include only communities that are open source, using the the OSI definition and their list of approved Open Source licenses. Which kind of communities to include in discussion/examples? #18

Questions:

• do we want to restrict our outreach to communities we decide (using the criteria we've already collected in this repo, but perhaps needing to be quantitative/more specific or prescriptive about how we measure/decide that a community indeed has such a feature) as being "great"? Benefit I see with this option, is that we 'quality control' that the anecdotes are indeed representative of the kinds of communities we perceive others are likely to want to emulate the success of. Disadvantage is that there may be useful insights and lessons to be learn from communities that are less successful. @bgruening discusses this in Collecting list of successful Open Source communities #13
• do we consider a 'community' project to be one that has more than 1 collaborator? i.e. how many people need to be involved for us to consider it to be a 'community'?

[konrad]

• I agree with the two points(scientific open source communities but due to our background a tendency to more bioinformatical examples + only poper OSI-complient FLOSS developments)
• I think we can be open to many project in the during the outreach and can dismiss content in the case we think the quality is not sufficient
• I would prefer to include project with different amounts of contributors if possible as each of these different constellations have distinct advantages but also face different challenges. That said - projects with only 1 contributor are IMO not representing a healthy community. Still, a community project could have only one developer but many other contributors that e.g. submit bug reports / feature requests or even organise meetings.

[aidanbudd]

Thanks for the feedback, @konrad.

I'm good with that - in that case, we could 'just' take the list of projects/communities we have so far, check each of them for OSI-complince, and get on with contacting people (once we have some 'example' texts for some of the features, and once some of us have tried answering the questions ourselves for our 'own' communities to see how we can work with replies to these questions)