The recent appointment of K.G. Schneider - prolific blogger on librianship, writing and everything else, since 2003 - as Community Librarian for Equinox marks a significant milestone. It is significant both for the FOSS development community behind the Evergreen integrated library system (ILS), and for the company that employs the majority of the Evergreen developers and provides installation and support contracts to libraries deploying Evergreen.

Karen describes her role at Equinox as chief blogger, presenter, evangelist, community liaison, birds-of-a-feather organizer, strategist, branding specialist, user-experience person, project management advisor, and whatever else happens to need doing. Sounds like fun. But in practice community liaison is hard work. Often you are interacting with volunteers, urging them to commit even more time to your project. Sometimes you are the only face or voice of a project that users come to know. Those not familiar with FOSS development and FOSS business communities will see you as merely a marketing person. Others will make assumptions about your intimate knowledge of the source code (and potentially be disappointed). You are always called upon to be enthusiastic, insightful, and, I think, slightly distanced from any corporate body that employs you. Your allegiances will constantly be scrutinized - are you there merely as a spokesperson for the support business, or do you represent the users' interests? So it helps if you are part of a project you are honestly proud of and enthusiastic about. From Karen's report, that seems to be the case here.

Fostering community could be the most important aspect of a successful FOSS development project. Some development environments, such as those found in the projects under The Apache Software Foundation umbrella, value community contributions as much as contributions of code. And since most Apache projects do not have a named person with the title community manager, everyone - both users and developers - is called upon to serve this function collectively.

I don't know when the community manager position was initiated. It seems like we have had people in those roles ever since the business community got involved in FOSS development projects. I suppose that makes sense since, as a paid position, the role of Community Manager needs some form of revenue stream behind it to make it viable. But that connection to the profit motive has also always required a delicate balancing act. When business does not play nice with FOSS development communities, relations quickly sour. Fortunately most FOSS-related businesses have a keen sense of what is and what is not appropriate.

There is a difference between a community liaison manager from a company that controls the copyright on all of the code in a project, and one in which the copyrights are diversified with only a shared licence holding the code together. A further difference arises between FOSS projects that are small, tightly knit communities - which, I suppose the Evergreen community is in many respects - and large communities full of volunteer contributors and, certainly, users - which might better characterize the Mozilla projects or the Ubuntu Linux distribution. A thoroughly unscientific bit of research using only a search engine (searching jointly for "community manager" and "open source") finds numerous entries, both job advertisements and company descriptions of their community liaison personnel. I might hazard that such a role is no longer an oddity - it is an essential part of how business interacts with FOSS development.

And in case you think I'm playing favourites by focussing on Evergreen's new Community Librarian, think again. Because of course LibLime - the largest installation and support company for the Koha FOSS ILS, and employer of a great many of Koha's most prolific developers - has its own community liaison person and open source evangelist in Nicole C. Engard. A sign, perhaps, that FOSS business and FOSS in libraries are developing nicely together :-)

Comments: If you can login to the eIFL.net website, then you can add comments to this blog post directly. If not, just write to me at randy.metcalfe[at]eifl.net and be sure to let me know whether you wish your comment to published and attributed (I'm also happy to receive comments that you don't wish to have published).