What Motivates our Community?

[Corné Aussems, geändert vor 12 Jahren.]

What Motivates our Community?

We had a small discussion on the 'Community Leadership Team' meeting concerning ways to improve the rewards given to Community members and what Liferay (community) can do to entice more people into contribution/collaboration/participation.

Since Liferay as an OpenSource project has not a lot of money to give away.

Traditionally in OS people (like me) first invest a lot of time/effort to become an experienced member and then after months monetize their experience and knowledge by becoming a Consultant or Senior.

I investigated this topic somewhat and i found out some members would be made more enthusiastically when they perceive a more direct (immediate) payoff and/or having benefits from their participation,

To me it seems that rewarding people instantly with work done and giving them virtual batches per Contribution and giving them a chance to build up a personal brand inside Liferay.com on their profile page will lure more members in than one time acknowledgment, additional permissions or goodies.

See my petty example.

Examples (Gold) (Silver) (Bronze) depending on the effort or maybe better just points Like Social Equity
- Translators and or Contributors to Translation
- Members of the Community Leadership Team
- Members of the Bug Squad
- Members of the 100 papercuts initiative
- Wiki providers
- MB ( existing )

I think besides some goodies & invitation to Symposium, maybe saving points for a free Training or issuing Certificate is an idea

I would really like we could have some feedback and discussion going on, because when we can motivate more members in helping we are contributing even more.

Greetings,
Corné

BTW Maybe this also works on Companies profiling them by contributing to Bug Squad or donate Plugins 'Businesses can use these badges to entice more business'

The surprising truth about what motivates us: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

[Tobias Käfer, geändert vor 12 Jahren.]

As I said at the meeting:
Compare it to something like a hobby (playing Soccer, Baseball, Football, beeing in a Band etc.).
You are doing this because of the fun of it.
If someone comes by and gives you a litte credit like "well done", it raises the level of fun you achieve with your hobby.

Besides the fun, most of the people, that are involved in all the community programs, use Liferay for their jobs (beeing consultans, using Liferay as a product etc.).
Therefore most of us have a professional interest in influencing how the Liferay products proceed in the future.

So what motivates me? What's the point?
Getting credit, recognition etc.? Yes, to a certain degreee.
Having an impact on the Liferay software? Yes, certainly.
Havin fun? Of course.
Getting money, incentives, prices, badges? It's a "nice to have", but not a must.

One thing I have to say: In the time between 5.2.3 CE and 6.0.x it was not a fun thing to participate in the Liferay community (see my forum post about the closing of inactive tickets and my comments to Bryan Cheung's Blog entry).
The way how Liferay deals with the community changed dramatically (from my perspective) and that motivated me to participate within all those community programs.

[David H Nebinger, geändert vor 12 Jahren.]

I can only speak for myself, but my motivation is to pay for something I've gotten for free...

I do a lot of stuff with Liferay CE edition, mainly as a platform for hosting intranet corporate (portlet) applications. For this purpose EE is not required and doesn't really have a value-add over the CE edition.

For implementing my portlets, I'm given:

• A portal container that is platform-, app-container, and database-neutral.
• An IDE to facilitate development of themes, portlets, and other plugins.
• An extensive community of other folks who have hit the same problems I hit, and typically have a solution that I can reuse.

And all of these things that I'm given, I get them for free!

Even though they are free, I'm now in a position to give back. I know a little more than the Liferay newbies, but certainly not as much as I'd like or as much of other forum contributors. So I try to help the newbies where I can, and try to stay out of the way of the folks that know more than me.

Liferay might not realize anything from my contributions, but my 'guilt' (from getting something of value for free) is assuaged by them. I don't need a badge, etc., as these things pale in comparison to the free things I've already received...

As a side benefit to my contributions, I've met with and interacted with a lot of great, smart, and friendly Liferay developers. It's nice having friends in the field!

[Deb Troxel, geändert vor 12 Jahren.]

There are a few reasons I try to participate in the Liferay community.

1. Increase my expertise in Liferay.
2. To make Liferay better.
3. To contribute something back in exchange for all the work that has come before.
4. To build relationships with people who have more experience and insight into the Liferay platform.

I'm indifferent to the idea of earning badges, but I do like Corné's suggestion of points that could be applied toward something like training. Maybe a points / redemption system so people can make their own selection from set of possible rewards. Since different people value different rewards, everyone could choose what they want to work toward.

I could also see the idea of extending the Partners program to include a Community Partner level, based on community contributions and participation but without a financial component.

[Juan Fernández, geändert vor 12 Jahren.]

What makes me participate in open source projects:

1) The will to learn new technologies
2) The idea of giving back to those who have created great tools I use for free every day
3) The idea of helping others
4) The sensation that provokes that other people around the world are using something you created in their everyday life
5) Recognition: I feel great when people thank my contributions
6) Intellectual challenge
7) The feeling of being part of something global and bigger than me

(remark nothing like money or mugs or caps are in my motivations... despite I LOVE mugs and t-shirts )
My two cents
Regards!

[Corné Aussems, geändert vor 12 Jahren.]

Thanks to all for your reactions, but ...

Besides our own altruistic, pay it foreward/back motivations, that i think does not have to be rewarded but with the occasional pat on the back or t-shirt. (i have 4 different ones now, but miss the comic-shirt 'hint' ),
what i wanted to discuss is how to motivate those others that aren't motivated the way we are, but could be maybe persuaded into some community contribution with some simple means.

I think we our selves are likely to be in the top of Maslow's heirarchy of needs.

But those that are not and are in 'Esteem' would likely be taken to the next level by acknowledging their good work en respecting them as good members.

Now we only have ranks in the forum and becoming a valued member there will take a starting member years, while their work as translator,bug squad, verifier, etc goes unnoticed.

Some read ups i found underscribe your motivations and one common 'respect'
http://www.flossproject.org/report/FLOSS_Final0.pdf
http://staceyk.org/personal/WikipediaMotivations.pdf
http://www.springerlink.com/content/mkh03l0464670x61/fulltext.pdf

So let me rephrase:
What could motivate community members more

[Tobias Käfer, geändert vor 12 Jahren.]

Good question Corné.

I will try to take my subjectiv view, to an objective one:

For me it is evident, that the things that I contribute do have an impact and that they are recognized.
So first of all you have to somehow ensure that the contributions of someone, who is willing to participate, don't get lost in the shuffle or the noise of the others.
For Liferay as a company that will be (or is) a hard task to face, since there are thousands of good and not so good requests, issues, questions etc.
BTW: I did stop contributing bugfixes to another OSS project, because other patches never made it into the software, until now.

Fun is another motivation for me.
Therefore the work with Liferay as a software and a company should make fun.
Liferay is doing quite a good job in this, especially in the last year. (Special thanks to James Falkner)
Communication with Liferay should be easy, so that you are not getting annoyed.
"Established" people should be open minded and not beeing arrogant.

Being rewarded (batches, titles, money, incentives) might be a starter for someone to participate.
On the other hand, when you are getting a title (eg. "Head of **** translation", "Community Leadership Team") you get responsibility.
Not everyone is seeking for responsibilty, because this takes away an amount of time, that can use for coding and solving problems.

While I was writing, I came to the conclusion, that there might not be a list of things that motivate everybody.
Somethings might apply to a group of people, other things apply to others.

And since we are all (or mostly all) individuals, I think it is evident to listen to people. Therefore to understand their needs, their problems and to assist them.
Helping someone is always a good way to keep them interested.
So when you help someone, you might get help from him in the future....

[Tomas Polesovsky, geändert vor 12 Jahren.]

Hi,

My priorities are quite simple:
1, I think my personal role is to help others - I have this opinion since elementary school
2, Why I've chosen Liferay - it's because of Liferay's answer to my big question: is software really useful? Isn't SW just for SW? I like the idea of Liferay Foundation and to help others through SW.

@Corné: thanks for your 2nd message, you shifted it to different direction - much more interesting direction
@Tobias: I think you're right - everyone has different priorities and therefore different motivations, so I try to abstract a bit

My personal thoughts (hope it's not too long and boring):

There are 3 different types of people in community (not mentioning people who are not (yet) a part of it - those who just came to ask one question per their life):
A, I've come to Liferay thanks to company - as most of us I think. Most of Liferay community members need to work with Liferay because it's their daily job. They are professionals (developers, graphics, consultants ...). They get paid for the +- 8hrs a day with Liferay. They don't invest personal time due to different life priorities. And companies don't invest money to enhancing Liferay because there is no direct revenue from this activity.
B, Then there is another group of people - individuals, which invest their personal time into Liferay. Beside work (where they may or not work with Liferay) they decided to help others. They create friendships + social contacts over the basic professional background.
C, And the rest of the community members are Liferay employees

I think what we discuss here is simply how to push people from group A into group B

Try to look at the problem from different side: what to do with person, who doesn't want to help, isn't an altruist and want just to built his own carrier? Nothing.
The only thing you can do is to show him, that you are not trying to fight with him, but to be friend. To show that there is something higher. And it's even more valuated.
This should be the vision of Liferay community.

Well, what to do now? We should show what the friendship is worth.
OK, so what usually friends do? They have personal approach one another. They talk, they meet, they share problems are they are here for you if you have problem. And true friendship is equal, not just one-way. We should do the same.

I think that we could somehow define the "friendship" activities. For example person from A gets direct contact to some person from B. Person, who is in B could get direct contact to C (Liferay employee). I don't know, please continue..., my brain just turned off

So my main thought (and back to start): through SW (which can be like chemical accelerator - doesn't change reaction but is needed to start the reaction) make friendship

I hope the text isn't too crazy

Thanks

-- tom

[Tobias Käfer, geändert vor 12 Jahren.]

+1 for your post Tom - Does Liferay ever get Facebook Likes and Google+ +1 or do I have to contribute my hack? ;)
It's mostly about relations, as you stated.
But why? Because you get a get (or want to get) a quicker response to your problem.
I "used" some of the Liferay guys as a shourtcut to some of my problems. And it worked (Thanks to Julio, Juan and Igor).

In the end it is all about getting helped, or did I get something wrong?

[Tomas Polesovsky, geändert vor 12 Jahren.]

Thanks for your +1 I think the "Liferay-guys-shortcut" is one of great features that community could provide - nice point

But why? Because you get a get (or want to get) a quicker response to your problem.

Yes, when you are using forums. But this doesn't apply when you write a wiki page, for example.

In the end it is all about getting helped, or did I get something wrong?

I think it's not end but start For example me - I'm in group B and this is not my motivation, but for those who decide to help (to move from A to B ) it can be interesting. That's why I think this is start

I think it's more complex than just doing everything to get quicker response. We need to find the fundamental cause we could work with Some vision / purpose that others would like to share. And if I understand it well, we can't use Autonomy as motivation (it's too indiviual ), Mastery takes long time and big effort. So there is only Purpose we can work with And here we need to find shared purpose - cause not an effect - that all shares. Then we will (maybe ) know what can we build on. But maybe it's me who's missing something here now

-- tom

[Corné Aussems, geändert vor 12 Jahren.]

Wow your input makes me wander on whole new tracks.

So types A. are people who did not decide on their own to go with Liferay?!

Maybe that supports the few statistics we have on Liferay Contributors.
We have now exactly ( these figures are strange? are these based on % of threads !?)
10 Liferay Legends
20 Liferay Masters
40 Experts
140 Regular Members
16000+ Junior and new members

So not even 1,3% of the members has a higher rank than Junior. (still counting Lisa Simpson and Brett Randall, where have they gone?!)

We should ask James F. for some additional statistics, we could do good things with those, maybe pop a question(poll) every now and then on this subject,
to really grasp this idea who is participating now.
Maybe find some data from other FOSS projects to compare.

[Tobias Käfer, geändert vor 12 Jahren.]

Corné Aussems:

Wow your input makes me wander on whole new tracks.

Isn't that what it is all abaout?
Getting new ideas, new points of view....
I like such constructive discussions.
The exchange of opinions.

[Tomas Polesovsky, geändert vor 12 Jahren.]

So types A. are people who did not decide on their own to go with Liferay?!

Interesting. Haven't thought this way, but yes - you are right. They doesn't have such privileges in company to judge whether to use Liferay or not. It's always manager/architect who decide and developers that have to fight. And therefore they are not always excited as they could be

The stats are really strange. But as I can see in the forum there are not all threads from past. The oldest thread in English Development is from November 2, 2007. I suppose these stats are counted also just from these threads.

I agree - we need more accurate information/stats. But are we able to aim the group A? As I see from polls there are tens of votes. But we need thousands.
Maybe some kind of more aggressive poll would help - e.g. modal poll you can skip, but still obtrusive.

Now I've remembered a talk I've had with my colleage a few months ago. It was something like this: Liferay community is also different from other OSS communities, because there are just several Liferay hostings (we all know why - it's because of java). So (to compare with Drupal/Joomla/... and other PHP communities) most of Liferay sites are corporate. Maybe that's another insight to: why there is only 200 > Junior members . We simply don't have typical OS users, because almost nobody use Liferay on his own.
But I'm just guessing. We need more stats

-- tom

[Tobias Käfer, geändert vor 12 Jahren.]

Tomas Polesovsky:

We simply don't have typical OS users, because almost nobody use Liferay on his own.

I do

[Mika Koivisto, geändert vor 12 Jahren.]

Tobias Käfer:

Tomas Polesovsky:

We simply don't have typical OS users, because almost nobody use Liferay on his own.

I do

Me too. And I even provide hosting for friends and their friends.

[David H Nebinger, geändert vor 12 Jahren.]

Tomas Polesovsky:

So types A. are people who did not decide on their own to go with Liferay?!

Interesting. Haven't thought this way, but yes - you are right. They doesn't have such privileges in company to judge whether to use Liferay or not. It's always manager/architect who decide and developers that have to fight. And therefore they are not always excited as they could be

Speaking as the architect that made the decision in my pond, there is this separation. I found Liferay, I evaluated what it had to offer, and I brought it in-house. The rest of the developers accepted it, but I can't say they ever really got behind it at all. One guy really struggles w/ the whole hibernate/spring/liferay stack (he longs for the day when a complete program existed within a single source file).

We simply don't have typical OS users, because almost nobody use Liferay on his own.

Well, Liferay isn't pushed as a CMS, a templating system, a single administrator system, ... It's not pushed for developers like ruby on rails or any of the other frameworks/stacks.

Liferay is what it is. And for most people who don't know better, Liferay is just a portal w/ a bunch of separate windows arranged on a single browser page.

While there are some of us that use Liferay on our own, I think we'd all say it is not the easiest stack to get up and running, even if you're just hosting your own blog or something. There are many other easier and faster to implement frameworks available for those tasks.

[Tomas Polesovsky, geändert vor 12 Jahren.]

Hi,

I've computed some stats of Liferay.com forums. It's based on 16491 users, 49258 threads and 174402 messages.

Some numbers (average computed for last 12 months):
* There are 14180 unanswered threads total, 258 each month without any answer
* 874 threads are created each month by 544 users & there are 399 users that every month answer 546 foreign threads
* => 70 threads are answered by owner or *BUMP*ing

Results for threads
* 3 threads have exactly 100 messages
* 2635 threads have 10 - 100 messages
* 47209 threads have <= 10 messages
* 47209 threads have <= 10 messages
* 40993 threads have <= 5 messages
* 11018 threads have exactly 2 messages
* 14180 threads have just 1 messages - the question

Results for user-messages:
* exactly 10 users have more than 1000 messages
* 215 users created 100 - 1000 messages
* 16266 users created <= 100 messages
* 13714 users created <= 10 messages
* 11693 users created <= 5 messages
* 5439 users have just one message

Results for user-threads:
* New threads were created only by 13522 users
* 7 users created more than 100 threads
* 896 users created 10 - 100 threads
* 12619 users created <= 10 threads
* 11508 users created <= 5 threads
* 6646 users created just one thread (5173 of them have own messages only in one thread)

Results for: how many users responded to someone else's thread:
* 8188 users responded to someone else's thread
* 4 users responded in more than 1000 threads
* 75 users responded in 100 - 1000 threads
* 8109 users responded in <= 100 threads
* 7532 users responded in <= 10 threads
* 6986 users responded in <= 5 threads
* 4372 users responded in 1 thread (1866 of them have just 1 message)

Is it sufficient?

-- tom

[David H Nebinger, geändert vor 12 Jahren.]

Tomas Polesovsky:

There are 14180 unanswered threads total, 258 each month without any answer

This is where stats can be twisted to suit any purpose. We could argue, based on these numbers, that there are a lot of questions that go unanswered, that people in the community are not being helpful, that they are not giving back to the community at all...

For the past few months, I've been hitting (for the most part) only those posts where there have been no replies, and answering those I feel comfortable answering.

I can tell you that many of these kinds of posts are too generic (i.e. "what is Liferay?" was one that came up not too long ago), are too specialized to a specific user (i.e. "I have my own authentication mechanism, how to I change out Liferay's with mine?" is not something common that many users would have had experience doing), but many of them are easily answered if the posters had simply RTFM (I hate saying that because I know it sounds very harsh).

To get back on topic, I don't think you can just use the number of unanswered threads as a statistic with any value; I think you'd have to include an analysis of those unanswered threads to categorize them somehow.

If you can strip out the generic questions, the specialized questions, and the RTFM questions, I think you'd find that there are very few unanswered threads in the forum.

[Milan Jaroš, geändert vor 12 Jahren.]

I vote for some anonymous questionnaire. Something short but useful. We need to understand our community better.

Another story for better understanding of OUR motivation:
At the very beginning I was type A (I came to company which build solutions on Liferay - it was 4.3 in that times) but as a time passed I "felt in love" with Liferay. And here I am. I started to spend my personal time to "have a fun" after few months in that company. And now? I'm not working in that company and I'm still a member (I'm very proud on Czech translation - we built up nice team; I started a Pootle with Daniel, Julio and others; I read through forums and blogs time to time). As you can see, I'm not a holly contributor and bug-killer. But I sill feel like a member.

This is what we need. We need to show to new users how great Liferay is. We need to show to the world that "Liferay is a software with a heart."

[Drew Blessing, geändert vor 12 Jahren.]

Milan Jaroš:

This is what we need. We need to show to new users how great Liferay is. We need to show to the world that "Liferay is a software with a heart."

Agreed! Liferay is great!

I also came on as a Type A and quickly realized how amazing Liferay is and wanted to contribute.

I participate in the community for many of the reasons discussed throughout this thread. Ultimately though it's about giving back to Liferay and the community and collaborating with other members. The way I see it, the help I get from the community is incentive enough.

I do think though that it would be nice to devise some other system for recognizing the active community members. The current method of ranking in the forums is certainly skewed. Right now it's about when you join the community and quantity of posts rather than value.

[Victor Zorin, geändert vor 12 Jahren.]

I vote for some anonymous questionnaire. Something short but useful. We need to understand our community better.

We can produce a Liferay community survey and give access to everyone to fill in, anonymously or not. At least this will be an independent (from Liferay Inc) assessment of community feelings and expectations.
If you know any questions (and possible answers), post them in this thread, and we'll quickly include them into a public survey. Up-to-date results Excel spreadsheet will always be made available for downloading to everyone interested.

[James Falkner, geändert vor 12 Jahren.]

Victor Zorin:

I vote for some anonymous questionnaire. Something short but useful. We need to understand our community better.

We can produce a Liferay community survey and give access to everyone to fill in, anonymously or not. At least this will be an independent (from Liferay Inc) assessment of community feelings and expectations.
If you know any questions (and possible answers), post them in this thread, and we'll quickly include them into a public survey. Up-to-date results Excel spreadsheet will always be made available for downloading to everyone interested.

Wow, this thread gets better every day, thanks for the excellent and thoughtful posts. One thing to keep in mind with "unanwered forum posts" is that that in many cases, people neglect to come back and mark "this is a good answer" flag to indicate the question has been answered -- they read the answer and then move on.

I agree with the assessment of the types of people and the progression from "Have to use Liferay" to "Want to use Liferay" and "Want to Contribute". I also loved this quote from Tomas:

Tomas:

The only thing you can do is to show him, that you are not trying to fight with him, but to be friend. To show that there is something higher. And it's even more valuated.
This should be the vision of Liferay community.

I don't think we'll ever make group B approach the size of group A. Nor do I want that to happen, because it would mean that there are no more "newbies" who are just starting with Liferay and have a simple question or two

As community manager, I wholeheartedly support generating statistics. There is a ton to mine from our database and the built-in features only scratch the surface. Since the forum is probably the most active tool used by the community, it is a good place to look for stats, but it is not the only one. I am going to start a series of blog posts about interesting stats. Perhaps a "Social Analytics" plugin for the Liferay Marketplace is also in order My guess is that would be very useful, and popular.

I am also very supportive of a community survey, especially when the questions are generated by our community leaders like those in this thread. I will offer to use Liferay's surveymonkey account (we have an unlimited account) - of course the survey can be anonymous.

As far as questions for a survey, here are a couple:

Motivation:
- Why do you use Liferay?
- How long have you used it?
- What is your relationship to Liferay? (community member, customer, partner, employee, etc)
- Have you attended an event where Liferay was the main focus?

Community:
- Do you feel adequately informed of Community activity?
- Where do you get most of your community information (forums, blogs, twitter, etc)
- What do you like most about the community?
- What do you like least about the community?
- What would you most like to see improved?

My colleague @ Alfresco recently did something like this. You can see the results here (and we can probably get some idea of more questions as well).

[Tomas Polesovsky, geändert vor 12 Jahren.]

Lets go survey!

But, hey, please stop. What's the goal? To know how to motivate community members? Is this really the most helpful think we could do? I don't think so.

I personally feel that there are pretty heavier problems in the air. We should concentrate on those and motivation comes by the way. If I understand the Alfresco survey well, the key goal was to know where are the holes in our boat, captains First fix the holes, then paint the boat Do we really know our problems? Problems of newbies, users (these who use it) and contributors? Every group has specific ones and all are important. Maybe that community is really bunch of newbies and the rest - to be clear - it's not us and them - everyone is a part of the community and they should know about it (community without newbies is just a boat full of old rats ) But our task (regardless of our size) is to help them and their task is to listen. Everyone who wants to listen is welcome.

Well, I think the goal of this survey should uncover problems of the domain groups - newbies (group A), and group B - users and old rats . Maybe some survey could go also to Liferay employees, what do they think? ;)

My friend has one gold rule - don't come with problem, come with a solution (doesn't mind if bad / primitive solution). So first part should be something like - "How can we help you?" and the second part "Tell us simplest solution how would you solve it?" - keep in mind that everyone has responsibilities (together with influence) in the community - even survey takers (and I want smart community members who think, not those who only choose from A,B,C).

Survey can be segmented by vertical view (groups (newbies, users + rats) specific view) and horizontal view (problem domains questions). We first need to aim the user - from which continent, developer/manager, how long live with Liferay, already community member? - to correctly setup the vertical view. The horizontal could have categories:
I, what are we not aware of
1, your problems - how can we help you
2, tell us the simplest solution you see
II, what are we aware of (in case the category I, won't bring any results ):
3, knowledge (how they get to solutions, is documentation complete/useful, is forum well organized, etc., are forum answers helpful, response in-time?, what about wiki, blogs, do you want to go deeper inside the portal?),
4, contributions (how many , how would they imagine to contribute, what are we missing),
5, social aspects (community mood, expectations, do you want to be part of community+why (not), symposiums/local events, what do you (dis)like),
6, another (quality, security, ...?) ... please help ...

Together with stats we should have good knowledge which group want's what, some ideas how to solve it and how is the survey complete - how many peoples we have in each category and how are the problems hot (we still need to somehow deliver the survey to more than 30 users ;) ).

And after this we can start to work on it. 100 PCs, Leadership team, Bug Squad and Community Verifiers teams are gaining big success (thanks to big James' effort!). Why not to continue and create workgroup(s) to solve discovered problems (e.g. documentation sqad )? I know it takes James' time to organize it but it has visible and useful results.

This could be a way how to rise motivation. We can give them better knowledge of Liferay, learn new technologies, help them to scratch their own itches (they still have to to listen what to do) and they give something back to community - help us (and themselves), will be part of something bigger and they will gain respect - which are the motivators we have and expressed.

I hope it makes sense - I've never conducted any survey so I can be totally out

-- tom

[Victor Zorin, geändert vor 12 Jahren.]

Ok, let's do it (survey), sounds like we have plenty of questions to ask and analyze.
By the end of next week we'll put an initial survey based on the above questions and mentioned Alfresco poll.

I expect it to be fairly large and people may not be able to answer it in a single go, so based on our experience of doing similar setup, I would suggest to have 2 types of survey initiation:
1) Half-anonymous: Participant requests login by supplying email address with subsequent log ins & log outs. Password is generated and emailed. On every login the user will be automatically directed to a last visited section of survey
2) Fully-anonymous: Participant starts survey, types answers, then if can not complete entire survey in one go - clicks 'Suspend Survey'. Encrypted file is generated and it shall be saved on participant's desktop/memory stick. To 'Resume' survey, this file shall be uploaded back to survey portlet.

It is also very likely that we will have sections and subsections (and may be sub-subsections), I would suggest that we would allow participants to jump from section to section freely.

Anyway, I'll post a link when it is ready for commenting on survey design. James, you may want to open a separate thread to discuss structure of survey. This thread is too important to be polluted by technicalities.

PS. We'll also put a real-time dashboard for each question that could be charted, even for incomplete surveys.

[James Falkner, geändert vor 12 Jahren.]

Victor Zorin:

Ok, let's do it (survey), sounds like we have plenty of questions to ask and analyze.
By the end of next week we'll put an initial survey based on the above questions and mentioned Alfresco poll.

I expect it to be fairly large and people may not be able to answer it in a single go, so based on our experience of doing similar setup, I would suggest to have 2 types of survey initiation:
1) Half-anonymous: Participant requests login by supplying email address with subsequent log ins & log outs. Password is generated and emailed. On every login the user will be automatically directed to a last visited section of survey
2) Fully-anonymous: Participant starts survey, types answers, then if can not complete entire survey in one go - clicks 'Suspend Survey'. Encrypted file is generated and it shall be saved on participant's desktop/memory stick. To 'Resume' survey, this file shall be uploaded back to survey portlet.

It is also very likely that we will have sections and subsections (and may be sub-subsections), I would suggest that we would allow participants to jump from section to section freely.

Anyway, I'll post a link when it is ready for commenting on survey design. James, you may want to open a separate thread to discuss structure of survey. This thread is too important to be polluted by technicalities.

PS. We'll also put a real-time dashboard for each question that could be charted, even for incomplete surveys.

Hey Victor, what software and/or site will you use for the survey? It sounds like you have one in mind I've also volunteered to use SurveyMonkey.

In any case, be aware that really long surveys tend to be ignored too So if it takes an hour to complete, that might be a problem. But let's see what kind of question we can come up with. If you already have an idea of where to host the survey, then we can wait until you get an initial skeleton up and then discuss in a separate thread (feel free to open one once you have something we can all look at and discuss).

[Victor Zorin, geändert vor 12 Jahren.]

I was suggesting to use liferay-based survey portlet on one of own sites. Over the last 2 years it was used many times for corporate surveys on Liferay5.2.3 and 6.1. There is not much fun to use someone-else's online capability for needs of a world-leading portal ().

I think even the fact of using native Liferay survey portlet may also attract more participants. Seeing real-time OOTB and custom applications ticking on Liferay6.1 CE could be another part of community motivation.

I have not used surveymonkey, so it would be hard for me to understand effort involved in setting Liferay community survey on it. May be someone else has surveymonkey expertise?

[James Falkner, geändert vor 12 Jahren.]

Victor Zorin:

I was suggesting to use liferay-based survey portlet on one of own sites. Over the last 2 years it was used many times for corporate surveys on Liferay5.2.3 and 6.1. There is not much fun to use someone-else's online capability for needs of a world-leading portal ().

I think even the fact of using native Liferay survey portlet may also attract more participants. Seeing real-time OOTB and custom applications ticking on Liferay6.1 CE could be another part of community motivation.

I have not used surveymonkey, so it would be hard for me to understand effort involved in setting Liferay community survey on it. May be someone else has surveymonkey expertise?

Oh, I knew you were going to volunteer your services here And I wholeheartedly accept We (Liferay) have a surveymonkey account where you can create surveys and embed them elsewhere, I was just offering to use that (I've used it a couple of times before), but using CE for a Community survey sounds more inviting and fun :-)

[Victor Zorin, geändert vor 12 Jahren.]

James Falkner:

surveys...
Oh, I knew you were going to volunteer your services here..., but using CE for a Community survey sounds more inviting and fun :-)

A brief note: I have asked our Team Leader, Rhys, to commence mapping the survey structure, based on your and Tomas input and Alfresco sample.
Survey should be coming up for discussions soon (subject to other workload...), hopefully by the end of next week.
Rhys will join Liferay forum and will continue this conversation when ready.

[Mika Koivisto, geändert vor 12 Jahren.]

I guess I started from group B first using it for my own purposes. Once I fell in love with it I started promoting it at work and after several years I now belong to group C. Liferay wasn't first portal I used but rather became the #1 choice after evaluating all the portals that I could get my hands on. I still keep tabs on the competition and I'm still very pleased with my investment in Liferay and where it's heading.

[James Falkner, geändert vor 12 Jahren.]

Yeah, I just came here to bump this thread and find out if Victor & Co. have had a chance to work on the survey!

[Corné Aussems, geändert vor 12 Jahren.]

I started 2 weeks ago with summing up a list of questions.
Until today i did not have time finish.
Hope to find some time this week if there is still need for some input.

Otherwise I focus on translations which are also way due.

[Victor Zorin, geändert vor 12 Jahren.]

Yes, we have. I'll put out the suggestions this week. As usual, takes longer than expected as new projects kick in...

[James Falkner, geändert vor 12 Jahren.]

Victor Zorin:

Yes, we have. I'll put out the suggestions this week. As usual, takes longer than expected as new projects kick in...

Friendly ping Any chance you could put out your suggestions in the next 11 days? We have our quarterly community leadership team meeting coming up on October 25 and it'd be nice to talk about this and move it to the next step during that call.

[Corné Aussems, geändert vor 12 Jahren.]

Thanks for all information sofar
As a start I promised some list of questions aggregated from FOSS studies.
I did not make verticals/horizontals as Tomasz suggests or spend any thought on how we should conduct a survey since i have no knowledge on this.

General:
What is your;
- Nationality
- Location
- Sex- Age
- Education
- Profession

Liferay :
How long do you know about Liferay ?
<1,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10

How did you get to know Liferay ?
Educational institute, Employer, Customer, Myself, Other

How long do you use Liferay ?
<1,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 years

How did you get to use Liferay ?
I decided myself to use Liferay, Someone else decided to use Liferay, Me and others decided to use Liferay

What ratio of your professional time are you busy on/with Liferay ?
10-90,20-80,30-40,.....

Which Liferay information sources do you use most ?
Books, LR Forum, LR Wiki, LR Blogs, LR Live, Other Forum, Other Blogs, ...

How many Liferay projects did you worked on?
0,1,2,3,4,....

What versions Of Liferay did you use;
1.7.5, ..., 6

What is your Liferay Projects CE / EE ratio
10-90,20-80,30-40,.....

Are you working for a Liferay Partner?
Yes,No

Do you expect Liferay to stay Open source?
Yes,No

Do you expect Liferay to be bought by Oracle?
Yes,No

Contribution :
Do you contribute to the Liferay Community ?
Yes, No

How much time do you spend monthly contributing to other Open Source projects ?
0,1,2,3,4,....

How much time do you spend monthly to community participation ? (School,Sports,Municipality,etc)
0,1,2,3,4,..
..

No I do not contribute
Why don't you contribute to Liferay ?
Not enough knowledge, No time, No interest, No expected benefit, Liferay is no true Open Source project, Liferay inc should do it.

When would you contribute?
Never, When i have more knowledge on Liferay, When i get Liferay recognition, When i get Liferay goodies, When i get Liferay training. When i get special Liferay priviledges.

Yes I do contribute
How long do you contribute to the Liferay Community ?
1,2,3,4,5,6,7 years

How do you contribute to the Liferay Community ?\
No, Forum, Blogs, Bug Squad, Documentation, Wiki, Translation, Fixing bugs, Community Plugins, Sponsored development

How much time do you spend monthly contributing to Liferay ?
0,1,2,3,4,....

What is your motivation to contribute to the Liferay Community .
Giving something back,
Learn participating in a group,
Build relationships,
Recognition,
Intellectual challenge,
learn and develop new skills,
share knowledge and skills,
think that software should not be a proprietary good,
get help in realizing a good idea for a software product,
improve Liferay of other developers,
improve my job opportunities,
make money

How do you value your Liferay Community contribution.
I give more than, less thank the same as I take

How do you value others Liferay Community contribution.
They give more than, less than, the same as I take

Do you think contributing to the Liferay Project improves your chances on the labourmarket
Yes, No

Does your company reward OS contribution by employees.
No,more salary, better position, provides worktime, provides tools, provides courses, other

[jelmer kuperus, geändert vor 12 Jahren.]

Ok here's my 5 cents

I think i can safely say that I fall in the B category but my motivation for participating in the community is quite different. My prime motivation for participating is that i feel it is a necessity for being able to do my job well. Like many opensource projects Liferay is not very well documented and many new features and best practices are discussed in the forum or on the blogs long before they make it to the official documentation. Being active in the community makes sure I stay on top of things

I am not saying that this is my only motivation but it is my prime motivation and I really can't see myself sticking around once i am assigned to a project that does not involve Liferay.

For me to consider sticking around Liferay would have to be

1) Fun to develop on. Yet the codebase is ugly, buggy, untestable and undocumented. Development is strictly controlled by a single corporate entity. As far as I am aware there are no outside committers. There is no developer mailinglist you can follow and Jira tickets with patches linger in jira for months on end.

2) A useful tool in my toolbox that i would consider using ever again and as such is worth investing in. But It's not. The community edition has so many bugs that it is unusable for just about any purpose, so i would not be able to use it for any of my pet projects without significant patching. And many of our customers seem to shy away for recurring license fees.

In the end I really don't think liferay inc wants a community, they want paying customers. Which is honestly fine with me, it seems to work for them. But I just don't see why anyone would voluntarily invest any of his / her own time with there being a premium edition out there and there only being a crippled community edition out there for the rest of us.

[James Falkner, geändert vor 12 Jahren.]

jelmer kuperus:

Ok here's my 5 cents

I think i can safely say that I fall in the B category but my motivation for participating in the community is quite different. My prime motivation for participating is that i feel it is a necessity for being able to do my job well. Like many opensource projects Liferay is not very well documented and many new features and best practices are discussed in the forum or on the blogs long before they make it to the official documentation. Being active in the community makes sure I stay on top of things

I am not saying that this is my only motivation but it is my prime motivation and I really can't see myself sticking around once i am assigned to a project that does not involve Liferay.

This is one of Liferay's biggest goals now - we have gotten a lot of momentum and want to use it to create a cohesive software package/platform that people would choose to invest in and use for their own personal projects where they are investing their personal time and effort.

For me to consider sticking around Liferay would have to be

1) Fun to develop on. Yet the codebase is ugly, buggy, untestable and undocumented. Development is strictly controlled by a single corporate entity. As far as I am aware there are no outside committers. There is no developer mailinglist you can follow and Jira tickets with patches linger in jira for months on end.

If you subscribe to the developer/core developer forum, it's sort of like a mailinglist But Liferay has historically not used traditional email-based mailinglists. I believe we are improving on our patch "linger" ratio with things like the 100PC program and bugsquad. We have a couple of engineers whose sole job is to take contributed patches from those projects and integrate them in for 6.1. We never really had this before. So I think you will see improvement if you give it another look. However, it's not all rosy and fixed, of course. We have more work to do (as a community).

2) A useful tool in my toolbox that i would consider using ever again and as such is worth investing in. But It's not. The community edition has so many bugs that it is unusable for just about any purpose, so i would not be able to use it for any of my pet projects without significant patching. And many of our customers seem to shy away for recurring license fees.

I personally feel we are improving on our bug management, as a community and as a company. However I don't have any hard evidence (yet) that this is the case, because we have rudimentary reporting tools in JIRA that I'm trying to improve on (through upgrades and some custom plugins). I hope to have more metrics here, but we are constantly aware of bugs, and do our best to track and resolve them. Part of the "no VC money" that Liferay is proud of is also not being able to hire person-power as fast as the community and user base is growing. THat's beyond my pay grade though But rest assured the point is not lost on us.

BTW, do those customers shy away because they don't think Liferay is worth it? Or they just don't want to pay for support and/or service calls?

In the end I really don't think liferay inc wants a community, they want paying customers. Which is honestly fine with me, it seems to work for them. But I just don't see why anyone would voluntarily invest any of his / her own time with there being a premium edition out there and there only being a crippled community edition out there for the rest of us.

I don't agree that we only want customers and no community. Liferay gets manymost of its EE customers because they use CE and want additional features or support. CE is EE's biggest competitor. Many of the features in Liferay were dreamt up by the community, and co-developed with Liferay, Inc. employees. Liferay would be foolish to turn its back on what made it in the first place.

[Mika Koivisto, geändert vor 12 Jahren.]

jelmer kuperus:

1) Fun to develop on. Yet the codebase is ugly, buggy, untestable and undocumented. Development is strictly controlled by a single corporate entity. As far as I am aware there are no outside committers. There is no developer mailinglist you can follow and Jira tickets with patches linger in jira for months on end.

I don't know the current situation but we've had outside committers in the past. I was one of them. I guess the problem is that we keep recruiting active community members.

jelmer kuperus:

In the end I really don't think liferay inc wants a community, they want paying customers.

I have to disagree with that. If I felt that was true I don't think I could work for Liferay. True we need paying customers to pay for our employees. The more we have paying customers the better the quality is also for our community.

[Drew Blessing, geändert vor 12 Jahren.]

jelmer kuperus:

Like many opensource projects Liferay is not very well documented and many new features and best practices are discussed in the forum or on the blogs long before they make it to the official documentation.

I think Liferay's documentation is pretty good, and improving. I also expect that I will need to be a little more involved in an open-source project and dive in to really figure out what I need. If I expected enterprise support I would certainly purchase a license and get help from the experts.

jelmer kuperus:

For me to consider sticking around Liferay would have to be

1) Fun to develop on. Yet the codebase is ugly, buggy, untestable and undocumented. Development is strictly controlled by a single corporate entity. As far as I am aware there are no outside committers. There is no developer mailinglist you can follow and Jira tickets with patches linger in jira for months on end.

I love developing on Liferay. I'm not a Java developer but even with my little bit of Java knowledge I have written some fairly complex portlets. I guess it may not meet your development needs. With regard to outside committers and patches hanging out in JIRA for a length of time, I can somewhat understand the problem. I have heard that Liferay's lead architects are very strict about code format, etc., and I completely understand that. It takes time to make sure patches conform to these strict guidelines and to test the patches to make sure they are solid.

jelmer kuperus:

2) A useful tool in my toolbox that i would consider using ever again and as such is worth investing in. But It's not. The community edition has so many bugs that it is unusable for just about any purpose, so i would not be able to use it for any of my pet projects without significant patching. And many of our customers seem to shy away for recurring license fees.

After working on this project for the past 9 months, we deployed the community edition to approximately 3,000 users over the past week and will expand to almost 60,000 over the next year. I haven't seen any bugs that were show stoppers. When I do find a bug, I report it in JIRA and have had amazingly fast response.

I'm sorry you've had some poor experiences with Liferay. I love the community and am much happier contributing here than in some of our other open-source projects.

[jelmer kuperus, geändert vor 12 Jahren.]

After working on this project for the past 9 months, we deployed the community edition to approximately 3,000 users

I haven't seen any bugs that were show stoppers

All i can say is good luck to you. I just launched a site based on liferay 6.0.6 ce which is pretty straightforward. (blog, messageboard, asset publisher) This is the list of patches we had to backport in order to make it work reasonably well.

LPS-11916
LPS-12012
LPS-12103
LPS-12163
LPS-12916
LPS-13526
LPS-13835
LPS-14081
LPS-14331
LPS-14475
LPS-15515
LPS-16004
LPS-16352
LPS-16478
LPS-16975
LPS-16994
LPS-16996
LPS-17026
LPS-16993
LPS-17037
LPS-17126
LPS-18043
LPS-18181
LPS-19231
LPS-19870

And i am pretty sure i am missing some issues here because in some cases i opted to completely replace broken functionality, rather than to apply a patch or i fixed it in a jsp hook

Mind you I am using the 6.0.6 release that supersedes the 6.0.5 release that was on the site for many months. That release allegedly fixed the most critical bugs in liferay 6.0.5 so all the issues i mention where deemed less critical than any of the many fixes that where in the 6.0.6 release.

The community edition is just not intended to be used in production. There are many vendors, that sell premium support, that make this claim but for liferay it actually holds true.

[Gaurang G, geändert vor 12 Jahren.]

What I can say on my part, what motivates us is to help others find their way / Appreciation / to be known across the community and finally the sense of challenge.
To increase participation I very much like the idea of a Free training / certificates.

Another option would be Group meetups (location based, hardly find so many of them outside europe / us), members from distant locations have started doing a lot in recent times.

Approach people who have already registered (perhaps with a community newsletter), with the most intereting newbie questions
since people who don't get back to community might be tempted once they see a good question that they could answer.

"Tell us simplest solution how would you solve it?" another very interesting approach by Tomáš

If we are looking for people to get motivated, incentive is not such a bad idea.However a more simpler approach might help. People who work on Liferay for real projects encounter quite a number of custom requirements, some of which require digging into Liferay's implementation and extending / implementing some new logic. There is keen desire to share the knowledge and perhaps help others who encounter similar requirements. But for this I really miss some place on liferay itself where this can be shared (may be that's why we so many blogs on other hosting with liferay tricks). Perhaps open access to blogs or wiki or create something like a 'newbie blog place' where all such 'innovations' can be shared and perhaps monitored and appreciated.

[David García González, geändert vor 12 Jahren.]

Hi all,

I think that Liferay forum should be similar to www.stackoverflow.com


This portal brought 2 revolucionary ideas to the old forum sites:

1.- Mark answers as "Responded" (this is also implemented now but It is not widely used) and vote the answer, this is very useful because you can avoid reading all the posts and read only the good answer discarding the others.

2.- I like the idea of award the users with badges and prizes. A user that gives a good answer and receive good votes must gain more points that users that only make open questions but never gives good answers.

Perhaps with this 2 new ideas users answer more questions and are motivated to do it.

What do you think?

[Drew Blessing, geändert vor 12 Jahren.]

David García González:

2.- I like the idea of award the users with badges and prizes. A user that gives a good answer and receive good votes must gain more points that users that only make open questions but never gives good answers.

This kind of sounds like a Google +1 or Facebook Like. I kind of like this model, though. It does increase the rank of those who contribute answers rather than just ask questions or just give generic unhelpful answers.

[Hitoshi Ozawa, geändert vor 12 Jahren.]

Victor referred me to this thread to get a question in a survey. From the posts, I'm not too sure if the content is right for the upcoming here.

I'm just wondering how many are using the OLA (OpenAM + Liferay + Alfresco) combination set.

http://www.liferay.com/community/forums/-/message_boards/message/10580564

[Hitoshi Ozawa, geändert vor 12 Jahren.]

Another question is how many are using JAM (JBoss + Apache + MySQL). JBoss is popular in Japan because of EJB, but I think that is
most other countries, Tomcat is being used more because it lighter.