Adam Rogers - Awesome Source: Lessons learned in open source

[rodreegez]

You've released your gem, it's wildly successful, now what?

Powder shot to popularity along with the Rack server Pow. From the start, we really encouraged contributions. A year later, Powder has GitHub stats of 504 watchers, 41 forks and 27 contributors - more than half the people that forked the project have contributed back.

This talk will relate some of the lessons learned managing Powder's development, including:

• how to handle situations when someone wants to take the project in a different direction
  to that which you intended,
• how to turn bug-reporters into pull-requesters,
• the right way to merge in changes,
• pros and cons of the "no issues, just pull requests" policy,
• why you shouldn't change your name on GitHub (and other fun gotchas),
• documentation, front and center.

[ugisozols]

👍

[5v3n]

👍 especially the "ho to turn bug reporters to feature commiters' part

[tlossen]

👍

especially interested in "pros and cons of the 'no issues, just pull requests' policy"

[rodreegez]

Do folks think I could narrow the scope of this some? Perhaps focussing more narrowly on the community management of the project? Maybe just:

• how to turn bug-reporters into pull-requesters,
• pros and cons of the "no issues, just pull requests" policy,
• how to handle situations when someone wants to take the project in a different direction to that which you intended

[moonglum]

+1

I'm very interested in the community management of the project. I'd like that focus :)

[DouweM]

👍 Focussing on just the community management is fine.

[mackuba]

👍

[mitch000001]

+1

[driv3r]

👍

[kronn]

👍

[yaph]

👍 "how to turn bug-reporters into pull-requesters" sounds like a good thing

[rodreegez]

Hey, so based on feedback here and actually having to write the talk and give it on short notice at Bacon yesterday, I've refined the focus of this talk to concentrate on getting people to contribute to your open source project. I've uploaded the slides I used at Bacon here: http://speakerdeck.com/u/rodreegez/p/bug-requests-pull-reports, but I would expect to tidy them up somewhat before giving this talk again.

What do y'all think?

[mackuba]

@rodreegez - I think every single point from the original list is interesting, if you can manage to mention all of that within the available time.