10 ways Alfresco customers can support the community

A prospective Alfresco customer recently asked me some of the ways an Alfresco customer can support the Alfresco community. Here’s what I said:

  1. Give your employees company time to answer questions in the forum or participate in the community in other ways. Perhaps set up an objective related to something on this list.
  2. Write a blog post about your experience with Alfresco (doesn’t have to be technical) then tweet the link with #Alfresco.
  3. Share your story at a meetup, Alfresco Summit, or some other conference.
  4. Make your office space available for local Alfresco meetups. If there isn’t a regular meetup in your area, start one and keep it going quarterly.
  5. If you customize Alfresco, take the customizations that don’t represent a competitive advantage to your business and contribute them to the community as freely-available addons. If you don’t want to take the time to package it up as a formal add-on, at least stick your code on github or a similar public code repository.
  6. Similar to the above, if you hire systems integrators, word your contracts such that they can contribute the code they write for you to the community. (Often the default language assigns IP ownership to the hiring party).
  7. If you choose Community Edition, give your time to the Order of the Bee so that you can help others be successful running Community Edition in production. The Order is particularly interested in Community Edition success stories at the moment.
  8. File helpful bug reports and make sure they are free of information specific to your business so that Alfresco will keep them public.
  9. If you not only find a bug but fix it, contribute the patch. One way to do that is to create a pull request on GitHub in the Alfresco Community Edition project then reference that pull request in an Alfresco Jira.
  10. If you see something wrong or missing on the wiki, log in and fix it.

Really, this list is mostly applicable to anyone that wants to participate in the community, not just customers. What did I leave out? Add more ideas in the comments.

17 comments

Comments are closed.