01566nas a2200121   4500008004100000022001400041245006300055210006300118260004200181520116700223100001801390856003601408       2009                        eng d  a1913-610200aLessons on Community Management from the Open Source World0 aLessons on Community Management from the Open Source World  aOttawabTalent First Networkc06/20093 aFrom 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.1 aByron, Angela  uhttp://timreview.ca/article/258