The Open Source Program Office is focused on making open source succeed at every level: community management, development, event management... every aspect of open source can be improved for any project.

With that mission in mind, a new section of our site is dedicated to hosting "evergreen" knowledge articles and links that will guide free and open source software project participants to better practices.

The impetus for the creation of this section was to find a more permanent home for great campaigns like Stormy Peters' #osscommunities challenge:

"Help us collect community knowledge by blogging about the weekly community management theme. This week's theme is Encouraging New Contributors. "Communities are what make open source software work. No two pieces of open source software are the same and so no two communities are the same but they can often learn from each other. Some have shared their best practices for bringing communities together, growing them, and fostering them. We have several books about communities and several conferences dedicated to them. "However, the information still doesn't reflect all we collectively know. "Your challenge, should you choose to accept, is to blog about a weekly open source community theme that we'll set every Friday. Blog on a separate platform, your own blog or Medium or other. Share your best tips and tricks in your blog post, then tweet a link to it using the hashtag #osscommunities."

This content is one of the first of hopefully many examples of expertise and knowledge that we will host on the new Open Source Program Office Knowledge Base. Know of any great free and open software content that should be included for reference and posterity? Let us know!


About the author

Brian Proffitt is Senior Manager, Community Outreach within Red Hat's Open Source Program Office, focusing on enablement, community metrics and foundation and trade organization relationships. Brian's experience with community management includes knowledge of community onboarding, community health and business alignment. Prior to joining Red Hat in 2013, he was a technology journalist with a focus on Linux and open source, and the author of 22 consumer technology books.

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