I wrote this review because of a new book that is about to be published, A Guide to Developer Relations. Also sort out your own thoughts on this aspect. This article is jointly completed by me and ChatGPT. I first listed an outline, ChatGPT gave a first draft, and I made another round of revisions, the text is as follows:
Developer relations refers to the process of establishing a good relationship with developers to promote the development, promotion and innovation of products or services. Here I explore the nature of developer relations and how it relates to open source.
The essence of developer relationship is leverage
The essence of the developer relationship is to achieve goals through leverage. Specifically, this leverage can be divided into the following three types:
1.1. Leverage the power of development
The most important goal of developer relations is to borrow, or call it, the power of leveraging developers. Developers outside of your enterprise can also be creators of your product or service, so it's important to have a good relationship with them. Developers can help test and improve the product, provide feedback and suggestions, and even develop new features. By building strong ties with developers, businesses can introduce new products and features faster, thereby meeting customer needs faster.
1.2. With the power of promotion
In addition to borrowing the power of development, companies can also expand the influence of products or services through word-of-mouth communication among developers. Developer relations can help businesses connect with others in the community, such as bloggers, social media influencers, technical speakers, and more. These people can help companies publicize, promote, and increase brand awareness.
1.3. Leverage the Power of Creativity
Finally, developer relations can also leverage the power of creativity. In an open community atmosphere, companies can get more and better ideas and ideas, which helps companies launch more creative products or services to meet customer needs.
Developer Relations vs. Open Source
The essence of open source is open collaboration in the community. By sharing source code, developers can learn from and cooperate with each other to build better software. The relationship between developer relations and open source has many levels, and the following three situations can be briefly described:
2.1. Using open source for developer relations
Recently, it has become more and more obvious that closed-source technologies are becoming less and less attractive. A company usually needs to use open source to promote its own new technologies and platforms. Open source projects can provide a way for businesses to connect with developers, collaborate, share ideas, and advance projects together. By establishing contact with the open source community, companies can allow more developers to have a deeper understanding of the product and the technology behind the product.
2.2. Do developer relations for the open source community
Now, even a fully public benefit, not-for-profit open source community needs to do a good job of developer relations. Therefore, starting from the practical experience of enterprises, the best practices of various developer relations summarized can also be used in various open source communities, focusing on developer experience, lowering the threshold for newcomers to join, and allowing more community members, Willing to stay in the community for a longer period of time is an area that developer relations have always been thinking about.
2.3. Doing developer relations in an open source way
The traditional developer relationship is often a series of planning and operation behaviors within the enterprise. However, from the perspective of learning from each other, many practices in the open source community are also worth learning from. An enterprise's developer relations team works in a more open manner, and even invites external members to join the operation team to form a more open, transparent, and responsible developer relations operation community, which will also receive good results.
Summarize
In conclusion, developer relations and open source are interrelated. By building a good relationship with developers, companies can launch new products and features faster, attract more developers to the team, and increase brand awareness. At the same time, by participating in open source projects and providing assistance to the open source community, companies can also build wider community relationships and make their brands more credible and transparent.
Author丨Zhuang BiaoweiEdited
丨Luo Ruiyan
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Introduction to Kaiyuanshe
Founded in 2014, Kaiyuan Society is composed of individual members who voluntarily contribute to the cause of open source. It is formed according to the principle of "contribution, consensus, and co-governance". It has always maintained the characteristics of vendor neutrality, public welfare, and non-profit. International integration, community development, project incubation" is an open source community federation with the mission. Kaiyuanshe actively cooperates closely with communities, enterprises and government-related units that support open source. With the vision of "Based in China and Contributing to the World", it aims to create a healthy and sustainable open source ecosystem and promote China's open source community to become an active force in the global open source system. Participation and Contributors.
In 2017, Kaiyuanshe was transformed into a group consisting entirely of individual members, operating with reference to the governance model of top international open source foundations such as ASF. In the past nine years, it has connected tens of thousands of open source people, gathered thousands of community members and volunteers, hundreds of lecturers at home and abroad, and cooperated with hundreds of sponsors, media, and community partners.
