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Useful on-line book for Open Source projects

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http://producingoss.com/en/
Producing Open Source Software
How to Run a Successful Free Software Project
Karl Fogel

Copyright © 2005-2015 Karl Fogel, under a CreativeCommons Attribution-ShareAlike (3.0) license.

I found sections of this book very helpful in framing the Farm Hack project. I recommend others taking a look - especially around documentation and cultural best practices.

Some excerpts:

From Introduction
"People should feel that their connection to a project, and influence over it, is directly proportional to their contributions."

From Chapter 6- Handling growth

"Codifying Tradition

As a project acquires history and complexity, the amount of data each new incoming participant must absorb increases. Those who have been with the project a long time were able to learn, and invent, the project's conventions as they went along. They will often not be consciously aware of what a huge body of tradition has accumulated, and may be surprised at how many missteps recent newcomers seem to make. Of course, the issue is not that the newcomers are of any lower quality than before; it's that they face a bigger acculturation burden than newcomers did in the past."

"How do people use a FAQ?

They want to search in it for specific words and phrases.

They want to browse it, soaking up information without necessarily looking for answers to specific questions.

They expect search engines such as Google to know about the FAQ's content, so that searches can result in FAQ entries.

They want to be able to refer other people directly to specific items in the FAQ.

They want to be able to add new material to the FAQ, but note that this happens much less often than answers are looked up—FAQs are far more often read from than written to."

Love to hear others feedback and hope others can jump into this as well.

http://producingoss.com/en/

bobbyfaraneth's picture

nice source