Community Involvement for an Open Source Project?

pfleming asks: "Several months ago I began a maintenance fork of some niche software. Essentially, these are PHP/MySQL scripts for real estate offices. The original developer moved on to an incompatible version to what I was using. Upgrading for me and many other users was not the easiest option. Luckily the software is GPL'd and so continued work on the fork is not a big deal. I have set up a site, made it available for download, announced the availability of the fork on Freshmeat and the forums for the original software. Now I have a few people subscribed to the project on Freshmeat, and a few on a mailman list set up for the project. This project has been listed on the GNU Website and other mirror sites but doesn't get much discussion on the mailman list and nothing from the Freshmeat subscribers. There is usually an increase in interest (indicated by a short term increase in site hits) when new releases are announced but this fades back to regular traffic of ~40 visits per day as measured by webalizer after a short period of time. Is this an anomaly? Should I be thankful that there aren't tons of bug reports and feature requests?"

"More questions for you to chew on:

• Is there more interest in a new project vs. one that is more or less mature?
• Is the project too narrow to attract an audience?
• Could the underlying business (real estate) just be too saturated with web sites?

Just what are the secrets to a successful (measured by lots of contributors, etc) project...or am I just not defining success correctly?

What other thoughts does Slashdot have on this subject?"

Comments

My 2 cents

[JohnGrahamCumming]

There is usually an increase in interest (indicated by a short term increase in site hits) when new releases are announced but this fades back to regular traffic of ~40 visits per day as measured by webalizer after a short period of time. Is this an anomaly?

This seems pretty normal. Any time you make an announcement on your project (including releases) you are going to drive traffic to its web site (that's why corporations pump out press releases). The fact that it dies down afterwards is totally normal, you'd expect people to come, see what's going on, download the stuff and leave.

Should I be thankful that there aren't tons of bug reports and feature requests?

Probably not. This might be an indication that the software is wonderful, but it's more likely an indication that the user base is small. As the user base increases they are going to find all sorts of weird problems (especially with different machine/OS configurations) which will get reported as bugs.

Is there more interest in a new project vs. one that is more or less mature?

I don't think new vs. old is as important as good vs. bad. If your project is useful and well executed then you'll get hits. Just compare Mozilla with any of the thousands of "new" projects listed on SourceForge.

Is the project too narrow to attract an audience?

I doubt that. Real Estate is a massive business world wide.

Could the underlying business (real estate) just be too saturated with web sites?

That's possible in any business, if your project had some uniqueness then the saturation will not be important. Getting the message out about your feature set will.

Just what are the secrets to a successful (measured by lots of contributors, etc) project...or am I just not defining success correctly?

I don't think number of contributors is the most important measure. How about number of people actually using the software? In POPFile there's a feature where it can report back (opt in) that it's being used, this gives me an idea of how many downloads converted into users. Another measure of success would be mentions of your project in the press.

John.

Project web site

[JohnGrahamCumming]

It seems likely that the project is Free Realty.

John.

Re:Project web site

[ph00dz]

Perhaps... I think it was my project OpenRealty that got forked. (Not that I mind... working full time, I didn't have any time to support it -- one of the reasons it was GPL.)

For whatever it's worth, we're unifying as many of the branches as we can right now at www.open-realty.org. See my announcment on my site...

Not surprising at all

[Tim]

I help develop and maintain a project for computational structural biology, and our project stats look pretty similar to yours. We release, see an interest spike, then it dies down.

Factor in that you're in a very niche market -- real estate offices who have the need for a dedicated software package, who know enough about computers to use Linux/PHP/Apache, and who don't have in-house developers. Then, consider that you're not actually maintaining the original project, but a project that branched from the original so that users won't have to upgrade. It doesn't leave many interested users.

This is part of the justification behind "release early, release often" -- the more you release, the more hits you generate, and the more likely you are to find interested users. All the same, don't expect to get the hits of the next big RPG platform or internet chat application. The users just aren't there.

Promotion

[kimbly]

You have to let people know the project exists. Simply listing it on freshmeat won't get you much, as I know (I've listed a couple of projects there). My site gets practically zero traffic from those listings.

There are a couple things I've found that help. First, find a discussion group focused on a subject relevant to your project, and mention it occasionally when it becomes relevant to the discussion -- this gets you kickstarted, but it's not a long-term solution. Second, you might start some kind of blog on the site, so that people have a reason to follow your progress. Rant about the state of the real estate market or something. This is the long-term solution.

I've done both of these things, and eventually they get you a lot more traffic than freshmeat ever will. The more traffic you get, the more likely that someone will link to your site, which will raise your google ranking, which increases the amount of traffic you get, which starts the whole feedback loop all over again. You just need to focus on making sure that your visitors have a reason to link you once they're there.

Re:Surprising

[BrynM]

40 hits a day adds up after a while. Lots of people will wait for a bit more content in the forums/message boards before they try a new project. These are folks that want to be sure that the project doesn't die in 6 months or are looking for documentation. Unless the project is truly groundbreaking, 40 hits a day is respectable if they are 40 downloads of the project. A years worth of 40 hit days is 14,600 hits.

If you'd like to generate more of a user base here are a few ideas to try:

Cross post it to popular freeware sites and real estate sites. Remember that most freeware sites would rather have a link to the file than the actual file, so you don't need to worry about obsolete versions floating around out there.

You can also submit it to be reviewed somewhere (which can be a risk of it's own). When it gets reviewed, submit an announcement of the review to various real estate and PHP/MySQL news sites.

Write a HowTo for your project or find a user to write one and post it to the appropriate HowTo sites.

Post news on your site on a regular basis, like at least once a week. If you have to, set a schedule for news posts and post anything to keep with your schedule - even if it's just a "Nothing new, but updates to come - Here's what I'm working on" post. Sometimes a user will suggest something in response to a "Status" news item that will help you as you are developing. Be sure to publicly thank contributing users like that. It's an incentive for other users to speak openly and conrtibute ideas, if anything.

Whatever you do, don't be afraid to play the PR game. It may sound odd, but keeping the users engaged/entertained can go a long way.

Re:If you wanted traffic

[sbszine]

I'll give you the Jakob Nielsen-approved end user stream of conciousness surf through your site...

I started on www.rwcinc.net/freerealty, which I at first thought was a news page but later figured out was a sort of changelog / download page. I had a look around for install instructions thinking I might do a test install, but couldn't find any on the page.

Looking for an overview I next clicked on 'upcoming features', but found it to be a bit developer specific. (As in I would grok it if I were familiar with the source but couldn't infer much about the software as a casual visitor, except that it uses images and a db).

After that I tried 'about this server' (thinking perhaps that the software was somehow server related, or that it needed to run on top of a specific server setup). For about half a second I thought I was looking at the system requirements for the software, then I realised it was a actually a blurb about the machine serving the website.

Next I tried 'demo site', thinking I could perhaps find a demo version of the software alongside install instructions. I stared at the page blankly for a bit then finally figured out that the software was some type of content management thingy for real estate listings.

Suggestions:

• Add an FAQ ('what is FR', 'who is FR aimed at', 'what's the difference between FR and OpenRealty', 'how do I get the latest version', 'how do I install', 'what are system requirements' etc)
• Change the wording 'demo site' to something like 'view a sample site powered by FreeRealty'
• Maybe have a plain English analogue of 'upcoming features' ('in 2.9 you [the end user] will be able to do x, y, and z')

I feel like the archetypal clueless user after all that. It's nice to see someone caring about the usability of their site, though, so it's work the loss of geek points.