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→Lessons from the Hydra Community: cultivating a large, distributed, agile, open source developer network
* Matt Zumwalt, MediaShelf & Hydra Project, matt.zumwalt at yourmediashelf dot com
When we set out to create the Hydra framework in 2009, we knew that building a strong developer community would be as important as releasing quality code. By August 2010 when we released the Beta version of Hydrangea (the Hydra reference implementation) Ohloh already rated our committers as "one of the largest open-source teams in the world" and placed it "in the top 2% of all project teams on Ohloh." [https://www.ohloh.net/p/hydrangea/factoids/3944567 ohloh.com] In the 3 months following that release, the number of committers roughly doubled and the number of spinoff projects quadrupled. This early success is the product of a concerted, collaborative effort that has incorporated input from many participants and advisors.
Over the first 18 months of working on creating this software, we have cobbled together a formidable list of principles and best practices for developers and for our whole community. Many of these best practices easily translate to any development effort. They are especially applicable to distributed open source teams using agile development methodologies.
Building and sustaining a community is an ongoing learning process. We have already learned a great amount -- most Hydra participants agree that working on this project has made us better at our jobs. We would like to share what we have learned thus far and get feedback about where to go from here.
