#7 Collaborating: Plays Nice With Others

Show Notes

This episode of the Open Source Creative Podcast covers a topic that we see all over the place in the creative world, but it seems to be especially prevalent in the web communities of open source creative projects. I’m specifically referring to the topic of collaborative projects or community projects. Most people seem to go about the “recruiting help” process all wrong. My aim with this episode of the podcast is to provide a bit of direction about more effective means of successfully pulling someone onto your project. Spoiler alert: it’s these 6 things:

1. Be awesome
2. Be involved
3. Pick a feasible project
4. Don’t skimp on infrastructure
5. Establish clear roles
6. Approach individuals directly

I also have a question about how you, the audience would most prefer that I cover the Blender Conference. I could really either make a podcast like I always do and just talk about it… or I could try to conduct a few interviews while I’m at the conference and share those with you. What would you prefer?

Links related to this podcast:

• Panda3D 1.9 gets OpenGL updates - Panda3D is a relatively simple open source game engine that has historically played nice with Blender assets. Now it has more advanced realtime rendering capabilities.
• Haroopad - In the previous episode, I mentioned wanting a tool for doing narrative writing using the Markdown sytnax. This basically does exactly that.
• Lightworks 12 has some updates - Unfortunately none of the updates include a code release as originally promised. Still worth checking out.
• Inkscape agrees to accept paid development - This is a big step for them and I’m glad it’s happened.
• BlenderArt Magazine #45 is out - It’s a great magazine. Go get it! It’s free.
• Synfig Studio 0.64.2 RC2 - They’re getting closer to release. This is Synfig’s second release candidate for the latest version of that program.
• GitHub gets SVG Diffs - It’s really quite cool. You can slide a split bar and see the difference between revisions on an SVG file.

Also, I did start a newsletter. It’s a plain text, ow traffic thing where you can get about a day’s heads up on any events that I’m going to or any books or animations I’m releasing. You can subscribe by using the little form on the sidebar (it’s on the right if you’re using the desktop layout for this site).

And that’s that. See you next week!

6 Archived Comments

Guss, Oct 19, 2014

Great podcast as always. Thanks! I personally would really love a few “mini-interviews” while you’re at the BC… I’m thinking that’s a really cool idea. :)

Jason, Oct 20, 2014

Thanks! Yeah, I’m thinking that the mini-interview thing is a pretty good way to go. Of course, that means I’ll need to make it a point to talk to people, but I can get over that. ;)

Of course, the conference starts after this week’s episode is supposed to drop, so I think I’ll still need to record a short one for this week’s release and then put the interviews together for next week’s episode.

d., Oct 29, 2014

Interesting, but please lower your intro music. It’s way louder than your talk, giving me a heart attack every time.

Jason, Oct 29, 2014

Thanks for this. I wasn’t sure if the intro music was still too hot after adjusting it. Will tweak on the next episode.

Dread Knight, Nov 3, 2014

This is the first episode I’ve listened to and I really enjoyed it, gonna check out the rest given time. You sure have quite a bit of driving to do to get to work xD

Dread Knight, Nov 3, 2014

Oh yeah, I really agree that individual messages are way way more effective when trying to find people to work with on your projects, no doubt about it. Also, it’s nice to catch up with updates in awesome projects that I get to use almost on daily basis :)

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