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→Community Building and the Architecture of Participation
== Key factors for the development of the open source community ==
Communication is the main tool to develop the open source community. There are so many communication tools are available such as IRC channels, blogs, emails, conferences like FSOSS and much more. By means of these communication tools, a community member can interact with another community member, discuss issues with each other and solve those issues quickly and effectively. Community building was never that much easy before the invention of these communication tools.
Open source communities which support add-ons and extensions grow faster compare to those communities which do not support add-ons and extensions. If the product supports extensions, a member can contribute a code without understanding the whole structure of the product. He just needs to know the code around which he wants to edit. In these manners number of contributors can increase drastically.
“Release early, release often” is another motto which helps community growth. It means that a product should be up-to-dated. Let’s say an example; Microsoft takes around 3-4 years of time between each releases of Microsoft office. And everybody knows the differences between Office 2003 and Office 2007. The difference is so huge that it is hard to adopt. But if they would have released often with little bit of changes, users might adopt it more easily. On the other hand, anyone can get the latest trunk version of Mozilla Firefox from the trunk and use it. In this case, it is much easier to adopt changes because small changes do not affect users that much.
== “Contributors are God” and “Trust the community!!!” ==