Yesterday I saw someone post this image in a KubeSphere group:
People reported that the official docs suddenly went offline and the mirror download entry disappeared. Other groups quickly erupted, guessing that KubeSphere was going closed source. The forum also had similar posts.
Perhaps due to public pressure, the official team eventually released an announcement on GitHub and other channels.
From community reactions, this move caused strong dissatisfaction. Both community reputation and company reputation declined, and trust was damaged. From this outcome, the move helped no one.
More than three years ago, I joined the QingCloud KubeSphere team to do open-source community operations. Before that, my understanding of open source was shallow and I lacked experience. After three years, I cannot claim big achievements, but I have learned a lot. In this post I整理 and share those lessons.
Preface # I have written posts about community concepts and my operations experience. If you are interested, feel free to read them.
As the saying goes, to do a good job, you need good tools. Good tools improve efficiency and reduce repetitive work. Community operations requires skills in many areas: writing, video editing, image processing, and more. To work efficiently, you need tools across these areas.
In this post I will share the tools I use most often.
TL;DR: see the mind map.
Shared mind map: https://www.processon.com/view/link/642fbae46c39056f08596ee3.
Writing and content # Writing articles # I write in Markdown because it is simple and convenient, and many publishing platforms support it. Here are a few tools I recommend.
In open source, countless projects are developed and led by commercial companies. I believe they share similar concerns, and those concerns may not have perfect solutions.
Concern 1: Low staffing reduces community activity (focused on Q&A) # Lack of staff can come from many causes and roles.
When staffing is low, questions are answered slowly. Slow responses reduce the activity of people who ask questions.
In the previous post I mentioned that a community (an online community) has a lifecycle, moving from zero to growth and eventually decline. To extend that lifecycle and keep a community healthy, we have to apply operational measures. That is what I call community operations.
Operations differ across lifecycle stages.
Operations in the launch (seed) stage # In the launch stage, the goal is to go from 0 to 1. I usually focus on three things:
The idea of a community # In the traditional sense, a community refers to a society made up of people in the same place, region, or country. That is the sociological definition.
When we talk about community operations, the community here usually means an online community (below simply “community”).
An online community is an online platform that gathers users who share common traits and provides interactive services.
Community operations is still unfamiliar to many people. Operations as a role is relatively young. Many people are not sure what operators do, what responsibilities they have, and who is suitable for the job.
Based on my experience, I will share what kind of people are suited to community operations and what skills are needed.
Interest comes first # Even if many jobs do not match personal interests, I believe you need genuine interest if you want to do community operations. Interest gives you the motivation to continue.
As I mentioned in the previous two posts, event operations are crucial for community operations. Using an offline open-source meetup as an example, I will walk through how to organize a community event.
This post is long. If you prefer, scroll to the end for the mind map.
Clarify the purpose # Before organizing an event, we must first clarify the purpose: why are we holding it, and what outcome do we want?
In the previous post I mentioned that I joined QingCloud at the end of January 2021 as the operations manager for the KubeSphere open-source community. It has now been a year and a half.
Before this role, I knew little about open source. Fortunately, I already had more than four years of experience in technical communities, and there are similarities between the two, so I adapted quickly.
Of course, the twt community and the KubeSphere community are very different, so operations methods differ as well. In this post, I use the KubeSphere community to share what I have learned about open-source community operations and the surprises of this work.
I will share what a community is, how to operate one, and what I have learned.
I graduated in 2014. In my first two years after graduation, my work was close to my major, ecology. But I felt the future was limited and wanted change. After some basic research, I decided to move to Beijing and enter the internet industry.
In April 2016, I moved from Jinan to Beijing and became a community operator at the twt community. At the end of January 2021, I left and joined QingCloud, becoming the operations manager for an open-source community (the KubeSphere community).
