Let the community know

What problem does this solve?

A party that no one attends isn't much of a party. An OSM project with no active members is a dead project. A new tool is only useful if people know that it exists, and want to use it.

Careful planning and hard work are not enough. However awesome your project idea is, the success of your project depends at least in part on other people. A community project needs a community.

What is the solution?

Figure out who you want to help with your project, and who you are doing it for: who is your target audience? Who has expertise that you can benefit from? Who shares your interests and might want to work with you?

Brainstorm ways of reaching these individuals and communities, and contact them with specific requests or general notifications. Especially during the formative stages of a project, there's really no such thing as too much feedback.[1] Use multiple communication channels whenever possible: post to community noticeboards and email mailing lists, invite people to join social media groups for your project or event. Make sure that people have a way of contacting you back to ask questions or get involved. Keep a record of people who have expressed interest in your project, so that you can contact them again.

Include an outreach strategy in your project plan. Include your answers to the questions above, and your initial ideas for how to accomplish your participation goals. Be prepared to revisit this plan on a regular basis as you work on your project and ask yourself whether you have done enough outreach, and received enough responses, that you are still confident that your project will be successful.

General Considerations

• Let the right community know. If you want a certain type of person or community to get involved, reach out to them specifically.
• Let the community know at the right time. The PRChina project organized a series of 5 meetups on college campuses throughout China early on in the project. Holding these meetups early allowed this project to advertise its online resources among its target demographic and to brainstorm ideas for upcoming social media campaigns.
• Provide incentives. Some organizations give small souvenirs/certificate as incentives for people to to volunteer their time to the contest.
• Use social media as a tool. Social media could be a good tool to spread the word outside of the OpenStreetMap movement.
• Use as many tools as you can. Don't be shy. Use all tools you have to reach the community out. A banner on Wikimedia projects is the most powerful tool we have to reach people out. Before creating a banner, ask the community how to create it and in which cases it is allowed. In case you can not use it, do not ignore the rules. You have other options. Other ways to reach people out are mailing lists, IRC, Telegram, Slack, Whatsapp, and social media. Before paying for an advert, be sure you have used all of them.
• Learn about which channel was most effective. If you use a registration form before the event or a survey after that, ask people how they find the event or project out. That will let you know which channel was better or had more impact to focus on it for next events or change your strategy.

Acknowledgement

Much of the text was taken from WikiMedia