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
- users
- 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)
Tue Jun 28 15:27:19 PDT 2016