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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