People: Merce Crosas (scribe), Matthew Turk (scribe), Arthur Wetzel, Shava Smallen, Jeffrey Potoff, John Clyne (moderator), Eric Van Wyk, William Stein, Charles Torre, David Tarboton, Jan Verschelde, John McGregor, Hartmut Kaiser, Bruno Turcksin, Paul Navratil, Philip Wilsey, Anthony Aufdenkampe
How do you engage a community to answer questions (and make other contributions), not just ask them?
There are different levels and/or types of engagement:
Recognizing contribution is important. tenure track faculty are, for example, reluctant to contribute to the code of others because it doesn't help them publish papers. Need to motivate people to contribute by finding ways to benefit them
The are a lot of technologies to facilitate engagement (e.g. googleplus, github, different mailing lists, stack overflow, stack exchange, researchgate) The choices can be overwhelming and it is difficult to decide which to use.
There are cultural barriers to communication (e.g. old school email vs new social networking)
Quality of contributions: how do you ensure that code contributions, for example, are up to snuff?
Choice of implementation language may help/hurt from contribution standpoint: Lots of scientists know python, few know C++,
recognition: Having a story every week or every month about folks who have contributed is an incentive
Defining a roadmap is a good way to engage a community.
Elements of successful community building from http://yt-project.org/:
Lessons from http://www.sagemath.org/, which has over 500 user-developers:
Recommended resources:
Learn lessons from existing successful relevant projects: e.g yt-project.org, http://www.sagemath.org/,
Publish best practices