Now that we have some dynamic members, let see how to manage the Community !

To give a little bit of context, my team and I were located near Toulouse - SW of France - in one of the smallest agencies of a huge American company. In a nutshell, we didn't exist, but we knew it !

We were convinced that EDS could not avoid Open Source. More, EDS had to embrace Open Source practices and the Open Source Community was key in this change process.

To promote our ideas, we decided to be very active and visible from the beginning and to speak on one voice. One strategy we adopted was to have only few people from the team sending emails to the Community. In fact, I was almost the only channel used by the team. In a short period of time, I became "JY" in the Community. And it gave me the freedom to suggest and the privilege to be listened.

Another strategy was to share what we were doing on the open source side with some clients since EDS was running interesting projects, one of them being introducing open source within a major telco company.

I have learnt a lot from the team - some of them being involved in Debian community for years - on how to email : short, strait to the point, positive, with real value (vs show off). I learned to lead while practicing. And I woud say that leading a community is about 4 main things :

• listen to what is said and to what is not
• respect all community members
• be collective
• create a vision

It is crucial that you take your filters off, the ones that make you see red when it is orange or green. If you really listen to the community you get tremendous information on their motivations. This doesn't mean you do not have any position, any point of view. You must have one. A leader must care about the community. That means :

• there must be at least one email a day : write it
• bring out the positive from the negative
• leave a space for other leaders to emerge
• focus on the Community interest not on yours
• send positive stokes, warm fuzzies both private and public
• trigger people motivations among the 16 available

A community is a collective experience. Play collective.

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