TY - JOUR T1 - Lessons on Community Management from the Open Source World JF - Open Source Business Resource Y1 - 2009 A1 - Angela Byron AB - From the outside (and often times from within, too), the success of healthy open source projects defies all logic. Scores of individuals from all over the world, all of whom have different skill levels, use cases, and experience, not to mention native languages and time zones, collaborate together in order to help make a project succeed. How is it that all of this chaos comes together and creates something wonderful and useful? And moreover, what lessons can be taken from how open source projects work "on the ground" and applied to our practical, daily lives and organizations? This article will attempt to extrapolate some of the experience gleaned from being immersed for over four years in the Drupal project. Drupal is an open source website building tool which has transformed from a small hobby project in 1999 to a robust framework powering hundreds of thousands of websites today. But behind buzzwords like "social publishing" and "content management framework" there lies a diverse, passionate, and vibrant global community. We present some of the key ingredients to the community's success, many of which can be applied to any organization. PB - Talent First Network CY - Ottawa UR - http://timreview.ca/article/258 IS - June 2009 U1 - Drupal Angela Byron lives in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and works as a senior web consultant at Lullabot, an open source consulting and training company. She started in open source as a Google Summer of Code student in 2005, and has since completely immersed herself in the Drupal community. Her work includes leading core development on the upcoming 7.0 release and helping new contributors to get involved. Angela co-authored the O'Reilly book Using Drupal, is on the Board of Directors for the Drupal Association, and was the recipient of the Google-O'Reilly Open 2008 Source Award for Best Contributor. ER -