Florian Gilcher

Florian is an active Rubyist and Rustacean from Berlin. He used to co-organise the eurucamp conferences and is member of the Rust community team. Creative approaches FOSS project management is his form of hacking.Growing communities is all about activating untapped potential. Typically, this is done by creating expensive advertisement campaigns or hiring community managers. But this is hard for free and open-source projects: Usually, both money and time are scarce resources. The effects of this are often visible: overworked maintainers, a constantly growing number of open issues and glacial response times. This leads to a spiral: potential helping hands turn away from the project, even if they continue using it. For that reason, thinking about growing community early is important for all projects. This talk is going to present effective, inexpensive and time-saving approaches to tap into community potential for projects of many sizes, collected as part of the Rust community team, the work at Ruby Berlin e.V. and within the Padrino framework. It will also explain base techniques to get creative with community action.