"Open Source projects build communities, startups build teams." -Jacob Pattara
Introduction
As anyone who has ever maintained or contributed to an Open Source project can tell you, open source communities are the lifeblood of Open Source projects but sustaining them isn't easy, from organizing meetups/events with community members, rewarding outstanding contributions, automating certain tasks/workflows, etc
The work that goes into maintaining communities is why most Open Source projects never achieve their full potential and the fear of this is why most people are reluctant to create Open Source projects in the first place.
This article talks about a group of people who have discovered this unique problem and hope to solve it by building and maintaining tools that help make the task of sustaining and scaling Open Source communities easier.
Open Source
Meaning of Open Source software
Open-source software is a term that refers to publicly available source code that can be modified, deleted, added, or changed by any entity with the necessary knowledge.
In other words, Open source software is software that individuals can alter and share since its architecture (code)is publicly accessible to everyone under the terms of a licensing agreement.
[definition credits]
Meaning of Open Source communities
An open-source community is a collection of like-minded software developers who have decided, in essence, that two heads are better than one and believe that anyone with the required skillsets & knowledge should be given the opportunity to build, maintain, and contribute to any software tool that they deem suitable.
Aviyel
What is Aviyel?
Aviyel is a startup focused on trying to solve the problem of building sustainable OpenSource communities. Building, maintaining, and scaling Open Source communities is not an easy task, Aviyel wants to solve this by building tools that make it easier to efficiently build & sustain Open Source communities.
Tools built for Open Source communities
Below we are going to talk in detail about the tools built by Aviyel.
### Event Platform
This is a basic video conferencing platform built specifically for hosting events for Open Source Communities. It is built basically for users who want
The platform contains a section for;
- Questions & answers: Here people viewing an event can ask the speaker questions related to the event being viewed.
- Polls: Here the host can ask and put up specific questions as polls for the viewers to respond to, it's a great way for the event host to know the views of viewers on a particular topic.
- Public chat forum: This is a basic chat forum where viewers can interact publicly and freely with one another while the event is going on.
Workflow
For those unaware of the meaning of workflow, a workflow is a configurable automated process that will run one or more jobs. In simple words, workflows help you automate the little things like commenting on a pull request, thanking community members for issues raised, etc.
The workflows currently available by Aviyel are;
- Send Comment: Pull Request: This enables the Aviyel Bot to send thank you messages to contributors for opening and working on a Pull Request.
- Send Comment: Issue: This enables you to send a word of encouragement to the folks who have identified and raised issues in your repositories.
- Thread Opener: This allows you to open a thread each time a conversation needs to be started for a comment on any of your Slack Channels.
- Suggesting new workflows: If you feel you have a workflow that's not available then you can suggest a workflow and it will be worked on by the Aviyel DevTeam.
Community Dashboard
The community dashboard provides community members with visual details about the project. Below are a few data points displayed on the dashboard;
- Top Contributors:As implied, this shows a ranked list of contributors with the highest merged Pull Requests.
- Active members:This shows the number of members that have been actively contributing to the project within a chosen period(either a week, month, or a year).
- Members:This provides an easy-to-view glance at the members of the organization and their statistics.
Reward platform
Acknowledging and incentivizing contributors is a brilliant way to say thank you and nudge contributors to continue to contribute to your projects but sending a personal email to every contributor after merging their Pull Request while giving that rare personal touch, is inefficient.
Aviyel tries to solve this by building pipelines that collect publicly available data from projects like; Top Contributors, contributions merged, and a number of contributions per contributor. and assigns them seeds for each meaningful contribution (what is termed "a meaningful contribution" is determined by the project maintainers). It allows you to choose from a theme of badges available on the platform. These will be tailored, by the maintainers, to match the project's brand identity(Like you have a purple logo and your rewards are purple as well).
Another cool thing is, Aviyel is working to make this platform independent i.e it can be used anywhere outside the Aviyel platform itself. The badges are built using soulbound tokens( a new kind of token standard) and published on the blockchain so even if Aviyel goes out of business, the badges will remain. You will also soon be able to carry these rewards to other platforms like Github, slack, discord, etc.
Summary
As a species, we only started topping the food chain when the early humans began forming hunting groups and then communities, in other words, we have proved that we are way more successful and efficient as a species, together, rather than as singular individuals.
Open Source projects provide an avenue for us (builders of the digital world) to showcase what we can do together and sate that innate & primal need to collaborate but a huge hurdle to that is all the work required to build and support these communities, Aviyel discovered this and building tools to help ease this gruesome process that is building open source communities.
In the same way, the early men required stones, knives, bows & arrows, ships, fire, etc to make their communities prosper, we as open-source developers require tools to make our communities prosper as well, Aviyel is building these tools.
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