I am here today at the Dutch JoomlaDays conference in Utrecht, Netherlands talking Joomla developers about SugarCRM. Great conference with over 200 developers at the event. Kudos to Henk and team for putting on a great show.

I’m listening right now to James Vasile from the Software Freedom talk about building a community and a successful open source project. As an open source lawyer, you would expect him to focus on the open source license as the center of building a community.

Instead his his three building blocks of building a community are:

• Freedom - create community rules that give people the freedom to build, extend and share. While few people typically read an open source license, it is this contract that ensures the freedom.
• Sharing - build an environment where sharing is cool.
• Ecosystem - Focus on growing and invigorating the ecosystem around the software.

I certainly agree with all his points. A couple things I would add are 1) build GREAT software and 2) communicate, communicate, communicate. You only attract people to your community if you build something attractive.  People will only stay if they are working within a community and not yelling into an empty room.

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