Beyond Bits & Qubits: Effective Open Source Community Management in Quantum Computing SciPy 2023

basic outline of proposed talk: ### 1. Context This section will provide a brief introduction to Qiskit (https://qiskit.org) as an open-source package and some of the challenges we’ve faced in maintaining and growing our community. ### 2. The Academic Element One of the unique aspects of maintaining an open-source project in a scientific field is the closer relationship to academia compared to other open-source software. This can pose unique challenges, as researchers often have different goals, mindsets and working culture when it comes to publishing code, which doesn’t always work well with traditional open-source ways of working. We continually face these conflicts in Qiskit, so in this section we will talk through some of the effective ways we’ve found to address these differences through education and the development of of the Qiskit Ecosystem (https://qiskit.org/ecosystem). ### 3. Clearly Defined Spaces Defining the mechanisms for *how* different members of the community interact is a subtle yet crucial aspect of community management that requires careful planning. Whether it’s clearly defined issue templates, organised discussion forums, or actual events, having clearly defined spaces can help contributors and maintainers work together more effectively. So this section will demonstrate specific strategies we’ve used in Qiskit and the underlying principles that make them effective. ### 4. Be a Kind Human This section will focus on the incredibly important aspect of fostering a welcoming culture within your open-source community. We will touch on the importance of a code of conduct, contributing guidelines, issue tagging, using empathetic and accessible language, and other general tips for making the whole contribution experience inclusive. ### 5. Metrics and Automation This section will focus on how to use automations to streamline your contributor experience and collect valuable data along the way. From bots to actions to built-in GitHub features there are a ton of options to choose from, so we’ll highlight the ones we’ve found the most useful and the important insights we’ve gained as a result. ### 6. Development meets DevRel Effective community management requires significant time investment, which can take a toll on project maintainers. This section will make the case for working closely with Developer Relations experts (perhaps even hiring one if you haven’t already!) to offload some of that burden. Developer Advocates are highly specialised in communication for a developer audience, and can become valuable assets when brought into an open-source team. ### 7. The Community Management Graveyard To wrap things up, this section will cover ideas that we have tried and failed during our community management journey in Qiskit. Things that started out with the best intentions that just didn’t work out and what we learned from the process. The tone of this section will demonstrate how experimenting is an important part of the process of finding a community management setup that works for you, and that trying and failing in public is what open source is all about.