Virtual Offsite recommendations: Building FOSS Developer Community

Waku
1

Team members: @arseniy, Aaron

Problem Statement

Building FOSS developer communities is challenging despite having quality infrastructure. The key metric, GitHub PRs from non-core contributors, remains difficult to achieve with traditional approaches.

State of the Art

Current methods rely on expensive devrel activities, documentation, conference attendance, and hackathon sponsorships. While showing some success, these require dedicated staff and high ongoing investment with limited scalability.

Direction and Challenges

Previous efforts created residual value but are unsustainable due to limited budget and resources. We need low-cost strategies that leverage our existing 150+ contributor network and build momentum through coordinated community action.

Recommendations

Booster Club (Coordinated Engagement Protocol)

What CCs can expect:

  • Relevant posts shared by CCs in #booster-club channel

How CCs can contribute:

  • Engage with posts (preferably within 1 hour) with like/comment/share
  • Share relevant posts in the channel
  • React with (:+1:, :speech_balloon:, :recycle:) indicating (liked, commented, reposted)
  • Provide feedback on booster club in #growth-lab channel

GitHub Metrics Tracking

What CCs can expect:

  • Asks from leads to identify and maintain good first issues
  • Future discussion on automating github-related metrics

How CCs can contribute:

  • Provide feedback on how we can gauge github-based growth
  • If you notice a first-time issue creator or PR creator (that isn’t spam) share it with the org and consider reaching out

Strategic Content Initiatives

What CCs can expect:

  • Regular streaming schedule announcements
  • Support from Franck/Aaron and Comms team for blog content
  • Future guidelines for social media profiles and engagement
  • Future guidelines for participating in partner communities

How CCs can contribute:

  • Participate in Waku livestreams (host, audience, or speaker)
  • Provide feedback on how you use the forums, and what you think ideal forum usage looks like
  • Share blog ideas with Franck/Aaron
  • Be on the lookout for hackakthon winners that use Waku and help celebrate them
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