My friend Suman started an open source project called Rockstor back in January 2013.
Rockstor lets you create your own personal cloud service. Small businesses like law firms or clinics utilize Rockstor to keep their data offline.
Suman has been keeping me in the loop about Rockstor, and I realized I could write about his experience managing an open source community. Rockstor now has 300 active users and developers and 7000 downloads in 2015. I’ve never lead an open source project before, but that’s quite possible in the future. I would appreciate any advice he could give.
Here’s a few insights I picked up.
Rockstor Challenges
Suman’s biggest challenge managing Rocktor has been balancing his vision with user needs. To prioritize development time, he determined his users fell into two major groups.
- Group A has no money, lots of free time, and wants to help Rockstor.
- Group B has money, no time, and just wants Rockstor to work.
Suman gives higher priority to group A because these users also want to invest the time to improve Rockstor. He was surprised to learn these users were delighted to find bugs in releases, but he doesn’t want to throw away good will with buggy updates. He mentioned receiving 20 emails in a short time about the same bug, but they were all very constructive. Focusing on code quality is now a positive challenge because Suman wants everyone to focus on evangelizing and extending Rockstor, rather than tracking down bugs.
Suman would rather be patient with customers with money. He realized he would be in a better position listening to his community first, and improving the product based on the feedback given. This is similar to advice given to startups – talk to your customers first, get feedback, and iterate on the product.
Listening to Feedback
Here’s one example how Suman responds to feedback.
Linux Weekly reviewed Rockstor, pointing out missing features. As soon as Suman learned about the article, he responded to the criticism on the review, and followed up by creating milestones on Github.
So far he’s closed 6 out of the 10 issues in less than 3 months. That’s taking direct action from feedback.
Onwards
I’ll be following Rockstor’s growth and we’ll see how Suman evolves his management of an open source community.
Check out the project here!
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