I attend yesterday morning an event organized by Charles (Ars Aperta) at La Cantine in Paris. The exact title of this event was "La croissance par le partage, modèles de développement et de collaboration au sein des projets open source".
That was a very intersting conversation between all the great participants. None of the less, I've some thoughts that I want to further here.
I really don't care about the word we use when you "manage", "lead", "organize" a community, what I know is that at the end of the day, what has not been done by the contributors, will be done by you, the "manager", "leader", "organizer", "whatever". Things that nobody wants to do but need to be, are done by the one who feels invested or has been invested by the community.
On the resources management themas, all those people who come to contribute, want to have fun in a social place, it is a social fact à la Durkheim. But, as the 'manaleadorganizer', your work is also to deliver a product. You need to balance your resources. If I take the example of localization, there is no need to have a lot of contributors here, on the contrary. For OOo having two translators and two proofreaders is enough (of course, not when you start a new language). The rest of the proof reading will be done by the QA team. QA needs less skills and is more fun for contributors, it takes a shorter period of time, etc. Your role here is to ensure a good communication between localizer and QA team. There should be also a good communication between QA team (they have tested the product, new functionalities, etc) and the Marketing team, between Marketing and Documentation, because Marketing is aware of the needs users are claiming for, etc...
So yes, it's about sharing, but some in the community have to know more where, what and how to make the project life easy, funny and let the contributors enjoy there journey in this community :)
