Recognize your open source project contributors and grow your community

There’s a truism — if a community is not growing it is slowly dying. How is your open source community doing? Is your contributor base stagnant, shrinking or growing? Are you like many open source community leaders with little idea of how to encourage new participation?

There are many opinions out there about growing the activity around an open source project. Obviously successfully building an open source community-driven project is more than just throwing your code on Github and doing development in the open. Folks must know the project exists, that you’re open to contributions, what the contribution process is, coding practices in the project, and so on. One very visible tactic is to establish what is in some circles called “social proof” — that is, some kind of visual indicator that the project is currently receiving contributions.

What does the word “community” it mean in this context? A “community” is a group of people coming together for a shared purpose or shared goal. The traditional meaning is the folks living in a town, and their shared goal is living peacefully together in that city. But communities can form for other purposes. For example a Facebook group about electric motorcycles will host discussions of electric motorcycle brands, where to ride, how to maintain or customize the…