Growth: Accelerate your project’s adoption, usage and community engagement
E144 | Thu 13 Jul 2 p.m.–4 p.m.
Presented by
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Emily Omier
@emilyomier
http://www.emilyomier.com
Emily Omier is a positioning consultant who helps open source startups accelerate revenue and community growth with killer positioning. She hosts The Business of Open Source, a podcast about building open source companies, and writes about entrepreneurship for engineers for The New Stack.
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Matt Yonkovit is the Head of Open Source Strategy and Growth ( The HOSS!) at Scarf. He is a passionate open source professional with over 20 years of experience, where he has made a significant impact at open source companies like Percona, MySQL, StreamNative, Mattermost, and now Scarf. As a long-time veteran in the industry, Matt's passion lies in building sustainable open source businesses and bridging the gap between community and business objectives.
With a unique ability to engage both engineers and business professionals, Matt aims to make business topics approachable and appealing to those in the open source space. He wants to make engineers and open source professionals not cringe when thinking or talking about business topics. His focus on linking both technical innovation and business growth has played a crucial role in the success of the organizations he has been part of.
Matt has held roles across the technical and leadership spectrum at open source companies, including VP of services (support, consulting, managed services), chief experience officer, chief customer officer, and now the HOSS. He is the co-host of the Hacking Open Source Business Podcast.
Emily Omier
@emilyomier
http://www.emilyomier.com
Abstract
Though open source maintainers have many different goals, most of those goals depend on growing the project’s usage and community engagement. As projects get larger, they are able to attract new contributors and new funding opportunities, allowing maintainers to fix bugs and add features more quickly. A larger, more engaged community of users also decreases the risk that an open source project will be abandoned, creating a virtuous cycle of trust as more organizations feel comfortable using the project in mission-critical applications. Whether a project is a hobby side project or backed by a Fortune 10 company, growth matters. This half-day workshop is for any maintainer who cares about their projects’ growth, both in terms of number of users and engagement of existing users. Attendees will learn about the strategies and tactics to increase downloads, active user base, project stickiness, and community engagement.
Topics we will explore include but are not limited to:
Project positioning & messaging
Non-slimy marketing techniques
Collecting and acting on user feedback
DevRel activities and optimization
Keeping users happy via support, fixes, and education
Tracking and measuring project growth
Community management
Attendees will leave with concrete ideas for how to accelerate their projects’ growth.
Though open source maintainers have many different goals, most of those goals depend on growing the project’s usage and community engagement. As projects get larger, they are able to attract new contributors and new funding opportunities, allowing maintainers to fix bugs and add features more quickly. A larger, more engaged community of users also decreases the risk that an open source project will be abandoned, creating a virtuous cycle of trust as more organizations feel comfortable using the project in mission-critical applications. Whether a project is a hobby side project or backed by a Fortune 10 company, growth matters. This half-day workshop is for any maintainer who cares about their projects’ growth, both in terms of number of users and engagement of existing users. Attendees will learn about the strategies and tactics to increase downloads, active user base, project stickiness, and community engagement. Topics we will explore include but are not limited to: Project positioning & messaging Non-slimy marketing techniques Collecting and acting on user feedback DevRel activities and optimization Keeping users happy via support, fixes, and education Tracking and measuring project growth Community management Attendees will leave with concrete ideas for how to accelerate their projects’ growth.