Off-topic: how do you handle the community side of a small open-source project?
Posted: Fri Sep 11, 2026 2:30 pm
Mostly a lurker here. I use CC for cleaning up drone photogrammetry clouds on small heritage sites, nothing very advanced.
This is a bit off the usual topics, but it is the coffee place so I will risk it. Alongside the scanning work I help moderate a chat server for a photogrammetry and scanning user group, about 1,400 people now. It started as five of us swapping classification tips and it got out of hand.
The thing I did not expect was how much of the growth comes from a handful of members. Two or three people bring in almost everyone else, and until recently I had no idea who they were. I wanted to give them a contributor role and thank them properly, but the counters we had were useless: they counted accounts that joined, opened nothing and left a week later.
We ended up running a small invite-tracking bot that separates the people who stayed from the ones who bounced, and it reshuffled the ranking completely. The member I assumed was our biggest recruiter turned out to be third.
So I am curious whether anyone here looks after the community side of an open-source tool. How do you work out who is actually doing the work of bringing people in, and do you bother rewarding it at all? Keeping a forum alive for over a decade like this one seems harder than any of it.
This is a bit off the usual topics, but it is the coffee place so I will risk it. Alongside the scanning work I help moderate a chat server for a photogrammetry and scanning user group, about 1,400 people now. It started as five of us swapping classification tips and it got out of hand.
The thing I did not expect was how much of the growth comes from a handful of members. Two or three people bring in almost everyone else, and until recently I had no idea who they were. I wanted to give them a contributor role and thank them properly, but the counters we had were useless: they counted accounts that joined, opened nothing and left a week later.
We ended up running a small invite-tracking bot that separates the people who stayed from the ones who bounced, and it reshuffled the ranking completely. The member I assumed was our biggest recruiter turned out to be third.
So I am curious whether anyone here looks after the community side of an open-source tool. How do you work out who is actually doing the work of bringing people in, and do you bother rewarding it at all? Keeping a forum alive for over a decade like this one seems harder than any of it.