
Improving communities through documentation (2019) - Tomte
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/793927/ce2ce956f03c97bb/
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gnull
This talk is more of a rant than a good advice on managing a community. There
are cases when spending a lot of time on documentation isn't reasonable, and
the author completely ignores them, focusing only on benefits of having good
documentation, as if it was coming for free.

Also, the title is misleading. The "Improving communities" part there actually
means "Raising community's diversity".

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type0
> The group interviewed 18 subjects, some of whom were contributors and others
> not, and came up with five archetypes to describe them:

> Leaders, like "Rory", who are active in their communities; their activity is
> generally supported at work. Rory's biggest need is usually help in growing
> the community.

> "Avery", who is convinced about open source, but whose participation is held
> back. Avery knows the value of contributing and feels safe in the community,
> but is unable to fully participate, perhaps because of a lack of support at
> work.

> Competent people like "Taylor", who are not yet convinced of the value of
> participating in the community. Taylor does contribute, generally in the
> form of bug fixes, but doesn't see the point of doing more. Taylor may be
> skeptical about the owners of a project and is not sure what benefit would
> be gained from participating more fully.

> Curious people like "Parker" who do not yet contribute — we all began as
> Parker, she said. Parker is curious about how to get involved but faces a
> number of barriers. They may not be technically advanced or understand how
> open-source development works; they almost certainly do not have support.

> Lurkers; MacNamara didn't really talk about this unnamed group at all.

Or instead just use the idiot color archetypes
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22064530](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22064530)

