Sessions at Open Source Bridge 2011 about Community on Wednesday 22nd June

The best thing about open source projects is that you have all of your community data in the public at your fingertips. You just need to know how to gather the data about your open source community so that you can hack it all together to get something interesting that you can really use. We'll start with some general guidance for coming up with a set of metrics that makes sense for your project. The focus of the session will be on tips and techniques for collecting metrics from tools commonly used by open source projects: Bugzilla, MediaWiki, Mailman, IRC and more. It will include both general approaches and technical details about using various data collection tools, like mlstats. The final section of the presentation will talk about techniques for sharing this data with your community and highlighting contributions from key community members. For anyone who loves playing with data as much as I do, metrics can be a fun way to see what your community members are really doing in your open source project.

Hacker Dojo is a community center in Mountain View, California, for hackers and thinkers to meet, discuss, learn, create, build and play. More than a co-working space, more than an event space, and more than the chaos it could be, the Hacker Dojo encompasses the open source culture and spirit both at its start and in its continual development.

Starting from a small but passionate group of developers, Hacker Dojo has grown into one of the biggest hacker spaces in the world. The growth hasn't been without its pains, the same pains that successful open source software projects go through: How do we manage a large group of people with differing opinions and personalities? How do we inspire the many to help help the dedicated few who do the bulk of the work? How do we "indoctrinate" new members into our open and inviting culture without losing their valuable contribution? How do we handle the bad apples while building our champions?

Adopting an open source philosophy from the code to the conduct has enabled our community to grow, developing into our vision of a Silicon Valley institution. Hear of our journey of "anarchy with respect," and how open source works in physical space.