Barriers to community growth

"To build a successful community, it is usually sufficient to build a compelling vision, and remove all non-essential barriers to participation in your project that exist.

"I have compiled a check-list of various barriers to entry which are found in vendor-led projects, roughly grouped into technical, social and legal barriers to entry. Sometimes it’s appropriate for a new community member to face a learning curve - you want to maintain a tone in your community, and ensure that core developers understand the social and technical norms of your project - but often the things that they have to learn are incidental, rather than essential, and removing these is a worthwhile thing to do.

"Without further ado, here is Community barriers to entry (pdf) - I’m publishing this under CC BY-SA 3.0 and I would be delighted to get feedback on this to help improve it and make it more useful. Comments welcome!"

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