Unicorns Do Not Exist: Employing and Appreciating Community Managers in Open Source
Raphael Sonabend, Anna Carnegie, Anne Lee Steele, Marie Nugent,, Malvika Sharan

TL;DR
This paper examines the undervalued role of community managers in open-source projects, highlighting challenges and proposing strategies for recognition and role specialization to ensure sustainable community support.
Contribution
It introduces the importance of role specialization and transparent metrics to better recognize and support community managers in open-source communities.
Findings
Community managers are often overlooked despite their crucial role.
Focusing on corporate needs can conflict with community interests.
Proposed methods include role specialization and transparent metrics.
Abstract
Open-source software is released under an open-source licence, which means the software can be shared, adapted, and reshared without prejudice. In the context of open-source software, community managers manage the communities that contribute to the development and upkeep of open-source tools. Despite playing a crucial role in maintaining open-source software, community managers are often overlooked. In this paper we look at why this happens and the troubling future we are heading towards if this trend continues. Namely if community managers are driven to focus on corporate needs and become conflicted with the communities they are meant to be managing. We suggest methods to overcome this by stressing the need for the specialisation of roles and by advocating for transparent metrics that highlight the real work of the community manager. Following these guidelines can allow this vital role…
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Taxonomy
TopicsCommunity Development and Social Impact · Knowledge Management and Sharing · FinTech, Crowdfunding, Digital Finance
