Unicorns Do Not Exist: Employing and Appreciating Community Managers in Open Source

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 to be treated with the transparency and respect that it deserves, alongside more traditional roles including software developers and engineers.