Community Manager
This page is a continual work in progress.
Contact Information
TBD
Email:
Twitter:
IRC:
Office Hours: TBA
Description
The Community Manager is an individual responsible for ensuring successful collaboration and cooperation with the OpenMRS community. He or she does not "manage" people within the community, but does have responsibility for the processes and resources the community needs to produce software and services to fulfill the OpenMRS mission. This role requires dedication to the OpenMRS mission, values, and vision, as well as technical expertise and skills in conflict resolution, communication, and a deep understanding of the intricacies of cross-cultural cooperative work in a distributed environment.
Responsibilities
Community advocacy
Bridge gaps between OpenMRS "customers" (e.g., users, implementers) and contributors
Nurturing and growing skills and diversity of contributors
Communication of strategy and planning efforts within the community
Community promotion
Promotion of vision & mission, events, products and upgrades to current and potential community members.
Ensure representation of OpenMRS at key industry and open source events
Participation in outreach programs such as Google Summer of Code
Communication and responding to needs
Understand OpenMRS community participants (measure and report growth, interests, needs, fit)
Organization of community events and meetings (e.g., hackathons for focused software development efforts and contributor networking, conferences, project leadership summits, periodic community updates)
Mediation of disputes within the community should they arise
Feedback loop for software development
Building and maintaining appropriate community governance and balancing against bureaucracy
Manage collaborative processes used by community and maintain tools to support them (some aspects may report to engineering)
Represent the voice of the OpenMRS customer by listening to and understanding feedback within and outside the OpenMRS community. Assemble requirements & needs and facilitate interpretation with engineering teams.
Resource Requirements
1 FTE general community management
1 FTE technology infrastructure operations ("dotted line" report to engineering)
0.5 FTE (annual) special event coordination at 100% utilization for 5-6 months per year
Not Responsible for...
Directing or managing daily work of individual contributors
Defining software road map items or scheduling engineering work priorities
System implementation research, monitoring, or evaluation
References
Bacon, J. (2012). The Art of Community (2nd ed.). Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Media. http://www.artofcommunityonline.org/
Fogel, K. (2005). Producing Open Source Software. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Media. http://www.producingoss.com/
Owyang, J. (2007, November 25). The Four Tenets of the Community Manager [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2007/11/25/the-four-tenets-of-the-community-manager/