Weel 7 exchange and discussion on project sustainability

[jurra]

Hi all and welcome!

This week we have presented you with some real case studies and history of open source. We encourage you to talk about how this reflects in your project.

Here are some questions to get you motivated to comment:

• What learnings have you got from working on your core team?
• How have you found space and resources in your own context to work on your project?
• What things have made your initiative sustainable?
• What challenges are you facing with regard to expanding your community of adopters? .......

[cparrapa]

Hi great week quite extensive not sure if will manage to learn all the content in one week.

1. The core team is fundamental in my case people come and go so is always good to have multiple perspectives for the project.

2. A lot of research almost everyday, you always find something new (another robot/toy) but offline events it was the best for networking and meeting people that later on could contribute. Maker faires usually are good if done properly.

3. Keep documentation updated and push a lot in social media, groups, forums and chat, people get bored if is always the same, it needs constant iteration and evolution, promote with challenges is really helpful. We launched an Otto Club leader program which is like ambassador and it works somehow but to have people committed is difficult even with rewards.

4. Engagement is a roller coaster sometimes is too much, but for example now people is not so active as before, i think is because i so well documented that people don't ask for help anymore :D. So keeping people tuned is difficult because of the competitive environment and soo many distractions out there. But there are always a group of loyal members that stick around.

[jurra]

@cparrapa would be great to know more about how you deal with social media, what goods and bads have you experienced. I myself dont use facebook or twitter for several reasons.

I also like the idea of the Club :) What kind of rewards have you used there?

[cparrapa]

@jurra The Clubs we started only last year but i think people automatically were doing their own mini communities we just try to gather them in one place, i think many communities not only the open ones have this approach. more details here: https://www.ottodiy.com/blog/clubs.

The rewards even do i personally was giving away kits sometimes, mostly in events i think there needs to be a purpose for this so we combined with a challenge to basically push people to contribute with Remixes, https://www.ottodiy.com/blog/challenge winners here: https://www.ottodiy.com/blog/challenge-winners