Josh Berkus has a good piece on his IT Toolbox blog about his “Ten Ways to Destroy Your Project” (PDF and ODF here) presentation. He calls it community destroyers, I just call it community sabotage — ways to ensure that there’s no community around an open source project.

I’ve known Josh for quite a few years, and he’s definitely someone to listen to when it comes to building community. In my reporting days, I ran into Josh quite a bit — first when covering OpenOffice.org — he was a marketing volunteer for OpenOffice.org back in 2003 when I wrote about the project for LWN, about its efforts in creating a Community Council. And Josh has been heavily involved with PostgreSQL for many years, and is a tireless advocate for PostgreSQL and a very effective member of that community.

According to Josh, there are 10 ways (at least) to effectively hinder community around an open source project. (Taken from Zack Urlocker’s post about Josh’s talk…)

1. Have difficult tools
2. Encourage poisonous people
3. No documentation
4. Closed door meetings (or poorly announced ones)
5. Lots of legalese
6. Bad liason
7. Governance obfuscation
8. Screw around with the license
9. No outside contributors
10. Be silent

And, of course, the reverse is almost true — that is, look at the list, figure out the opposite of each item and do that instead. So, be sure to avoid unnecessary legalese (some, unfortunately, is probably necessary…), make sure your meetings are open and well-publicized, encourage contribution, provide documentation, and communicate, communicate, communicate.

I say almost true because the central point of community when talking about open source is, of course, a worthwhile project. Even if you do everything else right, you can’t really build community around software that nobody cares about.

I suspect you could come up with some ideas for building (or if you’re in the mood, destroying) a community that aren’t on the list here, but I think Josh has neatly summarized some of the most important functioning parts of community.

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