KCC (Kaiyuanshe City Community) Beijing District was officially established on June 12, attracting many open source enthusiasts and technology developers to participate. The on-site activities focused on the topic of "doing open source for a city" , including developer relations, the uselessness behind open source, changes in open source in China, difficulties and challenges of open source, and the contribution that individuals can make to open source wait.
During the discussion, attendees delved into developer relations. Developer relationship refers to the interaction and cooperation between open source projects and developers, including establishing friendly communication channels, providing support and training, etc. Recognizing the importance of developer relations, attendees explored how to improve and strengthen the connection between developers and open source projects.
@李明康 (Xiao Ming)
From the perspective of a commercial company, the emergence of the position of DevRel is actually the inevitable result of a leap in product power, and the business logic behind it is actually PLG (Product-Lead-Growth). Product Driven Growth (PLG) is a business approach where user acquisition, expansion, conversion and retention are primarily driven by the product itself. It embraces product as the greatest source of sustainable, scalable business growth, enabling cross-team alignment across the company—from engineering to sales and marketing.
The PLG model is different from the previous sales-driven growth (SLG) model. It does not need to invest heavily in top-down sales and marketing. The most typical application is a SaaS company. Users can register to use the product and generate payment. Behavior, if the user experience is good, they will often promote the product in their professional circles, establish a good reputation for the product, and thus attract more vertical users, so as to achieve revenue growth.
Therefore, PLG's business model is particularly effective for companies that directly target developers or improve productivity, such as Snowflake, Canva, Stripe, MongoDB, Figma, Notion, Miro, DataDog, Asana, Shopify, and Slack, etc. The value is very high, and almost all of them are unicorns with a market value of tens of billions. We will find that these companies are very fond of accelerating growth through developer relations strategies. In this kind of enterprise, developer relations positions are very important, for example, due to user interface design problems, developers cannot obtain the best experience; or due to lack of smooth front-end user experience, developers cannot easily call new APIs or SDKs ;Even a certain component design developer in your product wants to participate in co-construction, etc. - developers need more guidance and help, and the company itself also needs feedback from developers to continuously polish products and expand scenarios. At this time, developers Relationship positions are indispensable.
The position of DevRel is especially suitable for software companies that need to sell to developers, and these companies often adopt the SaaS/Cloud model. The most important job of DevRel is to help users succeed with the company's products. Success here generally refers to increasing revenue or improving productivity. A teacher said very down-to-earth before; "If you can make developers use your software to make money smoothly, the DevRel you made will be considered a success~", so developer relations are often assigned to the customer success department (help Make money) or directly report to the technical department (help polish the product).
The PLG model has been gaining momentum in China. In recent years, in addition to being popularized by traditional SaaS companies, emerging open source commercial companies have gradually become popular in DevRel positions. However, as far as the actual situation is concerned, the current market share of companies guided by the PLG model in China is far from reaching expectations. This may be related to the consumption habits of Chinese customers in the software industry and their market perception of characteristics. However, when more and more companies begin to pay attention to developer relations, it also shows that more and more companies are taking the PLG path. I believe that the minds of the new generation of consumer users will always iterate and adapt gradually, and the future is still promising.
Participants also focused on the futility behind open source, the potential value of open source technologies in different domains and applications. It was mentioned in the discussion that open source technology can not only promote technological innovation and collaboration, but also can be a solution for cultural transformation.
@Chen Yang
Yuval Harari said in "A Brief History of Mankind": "A large number of people who don't know each other can work together as long as they also believe in a certain story."
When everyone first participated in open source, they were infected by this open and collaborative culture and community, and they were not particularly utilitarian. Friends from all over the world could gather together to make meaningful contributions because they believed in the same philosophy. thing, it's amazing. This kind of useless work and the spirit of long-termism, on the contrary, let us taste the rewards that open source brings us ten years later.
Participants discussed why open source is becoming more and more useful in China. These include factors such as increased government support, the growth of the open source community, and the popularity of the open source culture. Participants agreed that China is gradually realizing the importance of open source for technological innovation and social progress, and has taken active measures to promote the development of open source in China.
The discussion also touched on the difficulties and challenges faced by open source. Participants provided a description of the difficulties in the sustainability of open source projects and community participation. The difficulty of open source is a value judgment. Optimists always feel that it is not difficult, and value recognition will make difficult things easier.
@Chen Yang
Contributors to open source projects are somewhat similar to working on indie games. We do certain things simply because we want to do them, not because we are paid for them. The social measurement system should be diversified, and enterprises should also have more responsibilities to make the world more diverse.
Attendees also shared what individuals can contribute to open source. Including participating in the development and testing of open source projects, providing feedback and suggestions, sharing knowledge and experience, organizing community activities, etc.
@赵千 (ah Q)
We do "what we can do and like to do", which is both open source and happiness. Just like the annual CosCon conference, most of the 100+ volunteers from all over the world are college students from various colleges and universities. Maybe they are not developers at the moment, or they may not understand open source technology, but the collaborative support of participating in the conference is also a kind of open source contribution! Or because of this participation, it has sown the seeds for him to make open source technology contributions in the future, which is even more meaningful.
Here is also Call Back to go back to the discussion on the first topic of the day "Developer Relations". The host mentioned: Everyone has been talking about developer relations, but everyone at the scene seems to be not a developer! Because the relationship between developers not only refers to the relationship between literal developers, but also the relationship between different roles in this network; in the end, I also gave an example that may not be appropriate, which caused the scene to "laugh". It's a funny benefit at the scene, so I won't give you a detailed description here.
@Zhuang Biaowei
3 hours of communication time is not enough, there are too many things to say. There are two old sayings in China, I refrained from talking about them at that time. One sentence is: born in sorrow, die in peace. One sentence is: People have no long-term worries, but they must have near-term worries.
Therefore, modern Chinese, Chinese society and Chinese communities, generally speaking: there are indeed many differences and gaps with the West, but this is also the national character accumulated in China's modern history. With the continuous development of the times and society, I hope we can become more calm and tolerant, more relaxed and confident.
@张林
I use my contact with several companies in my work to write some of my personal and immature views:
The biggest problem facing open source today is that it is fragmented. Each company wants to build its own moat and build its own small ecology. The construction of open source requires the joint efforts of everyone, which is a long-lasting process.
Enterprises should actively embrace developers, be user-oriented, and build a user ecosystem. It is really difficult in a short period of time, and it can be carried out in stages, such as building a small ecosystem based on the user's business structure, building a developer community, and continuing to promote it as a successful case. From a small ecology to a large ecology, and gradually improve, and finally open to the entire ecology, such as the CUDA ecology led by NVIDIA, the NVME ecology led by Intel, and the RDMA ecology led by Mellanox. These were originally small ecology based on their own architecture. With the development and growth, it will eventually become an open source ecosystem (personal immature point of view)
@ Han Fanyu
I just graduated with a master’s degree, so I’ll talk about my experience in school as a student developer. Most of the student developers around me don’t have a deep understanding of open source. I think the more serious point is that they just think that open source means The code is only placed on a public platform, and most students think that they will not receive any feedback whether they raise an issue or a PR, because they feel that other developers have no obligation to reply to themselves, even if they answer their own questions. Questions may not have any corresponding remuneration. If they themselves are the managers of an open source project, they think that releasing the source code of the project is already a contribution, and there is no need to provide "after-sales service" for the project.
Some students have never even tried to actually operate on the Github platform (such as raising an issue), so they came to the above conclusion. The reason for not operating also includes that students do not want to ask questions on a public platform, that is, they dare not speak. In fact, before I entered open source, I had a little understanding of open source. I think that for students, only after their own actual operation, they have really participated in the collaboration of some projects, and dare to speak and do on the Github platform, can they have a better understanding of open source. A deeper understanding of open source.
Author | KCC@Beijing
Edit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 an organization composed 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.
