Dawn Foster, Director of Open Source Community Strategy at VMware, is a champion of community strategy and development. A doctor of Philosophy, Foster is well-versed in the understanding of collaboration and leverages her mountain of knowledge to fight for the health of maintainers in open-source projects.

In this episode of The Business of Open Source, Dawn Foster joins me from the Open Source Summit North America to tackle community strategy and contribution growth methods. Foster also touches on the differences between open contributions and what project leads should do to help grow their maintainers.

Highlights:

• Why is it essential to have a contributor growth strategy? (1:46)
• Loss of control (3:10)
• How to be proactive for project growth (4:24)
• Proactive communication to foster a relationship (7:15)
• Non-code contributions are just as crucial as maintainers (9:47)
• Is it a mistake to have no contributor growth strategy (12:20)
• One tactic when being a single maintainer (13:33)
• Replacing your maintainers (16:02)
• Don't get arrested (18:10)
• Improving your skills in maintaining  (19:17)
• Navigating contributions to a project (21:29)
• Increasing the number of contributions per person (24:13)
• Example of a good growth strategy (27:07)

Links:

Dawn 

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• VMware