Balloons, Projects, and Python: Building a Sustainable Community
a talk by Van Lindberg
A lot of people get started in open source by “scratching their own itch” – building something that they want for themselves. But starting the project isn't the hard part: it is keeping it going in a reasonable, sustainable way.
I will be honest: creating and building a sustainable open community is hard. It involves giving up some control. It involves developing and exercising a different set of skills other than those needed for technical mastery. So how do you do it?
I will start out with three stories about successful open communities, and explain how they were able to succeed. Then I will talk a little about why these communities work. It isn’t fairy dust. It isn’t even altruism. It’s economics, psychology, and communication. Finally, I will give some guidelines around how you can build your own sustainable community.
This talk is suitable for both beginner and advanced Pythonistas.
Van Lindberg
I help companies with privacy and GDPR issues professionally. I'm around open source for more than 20 years, but his focus has always been on the side of “making communities work.”
I'm also one of the few people that companies come to to help them understand and build sustainable open source communities.