Building a Community:Lessons and Challenges

Dr Russell Keith-MageePyCon Russia 2013

2003

So much choice!

•CherryPy

•Quixote

• Paste

•Wasp

• Snakelets

•WebWare

• Spyce

•Nevow

• SkunkWEB

• ... many more!

February 2005

• djangoproject.com: Doesn’t exist

• Not open source

• Handful of developers (3?)

• Handful of sites (all Lawrence local)

May 2005

July 16 2005

July 17 2005

• 100 people in IRC room

• First contributions from community

November 2005

January 2006

July 2006

March 2007

• djangoproject.com: 1m hits/month

• 1000 downloads/day

• 4500 subscriptions on django-users

• 2000 subscriptions on django-dev

• 5 committers

• 160 entries in AUTHORS

September 2008

April 2009

November 2009

• djangoproject.com: 4.7 million hits/month

• 1000 downloads/day (5000/day peak)

• 16000 subscriptions on django-users

• 5100 subscriptions on django-dev

• 15 committers

• 447 entries in AUTHORS

July 2010

March 2012

• djangoproject.com gets 6m hits/month

• Downloads/day? But 10% of PyPI

• 21700 subscriptions on django-users

• 7000 subscriptions on django-dev

• 28 committers

• 524 entries in AUTHORS

How did this happen?

Right place,right time.

A little bit of

WOW!

Solved a real problem

Solved the whole problem

Documentation

http://goo.gl/Epzms

Backwards Compatibility

What have wedone badly?

Communications

Not my elephant,and not my room.

Bus factor

Engaging non-developers

Shoemaker’s children have no shoes

Everyone can say No.Nobody can say Yes.

Resources

Paying the piper

What aboutuser groups?

You need to have a reason to exist.

Culture matters

Bus factor

Different skills required

Resources

Good software takes 10 years. Get used to it.

- Joel Spolsky

Expectations

Questions

http://djangoproject.org

http://cecinestpasun.com

russell@keith-magee.com

@freakboy3742