Like the ants turn individuals into large contributing community
Channel: FOSDEM
Date: 2018-03-12

by Dan Franc

At: FOSDEM 2017

Complex Adaptive Systems are everywhere in nature, but they can also guide usto build large contributor groups. Learn how to apply their 6 key strategiesto create a global self-sustaining community, which were successfully used inevolution of the Google Developer Groups to a global movement.

Ever wondered if your project has a potential to engage a large, globalcontributor community? Well, likely it has. You just have to follow thenature! So consider ant nests, Amazon rainforests or financial markets… whatdo have these in common with global developer communities? All share the samekey principles enabling their relatively limited individual members tointeract, create emergent projects and co-evolve these ecosystems to massivescale in a distributed, boss-less way. When building developer communities, wecan learn a lot from natural systems about how to create a similar self-sustained ecosystem of people, contributing to a larger cause. The keyprinciples have been well described by the complex adaptive theory, but let’sbe very practical today. On the example of building [Google DeveloperGroups](https://developers.google.com/groups/) from few contributors 9 yearsago to today’s massive global volunteer movement running one meetup eventapproximately every hour, we’ll show how _you_ can apply the very sameprinciples to _your_ community or volunteer based project and grow yourecosystem big, yet still actionable.


Room: UD2.119 (Moved from AW1.124)
Scheduled start: 2017-02-05 13:50:00