Building Communities Around Your Projects

A community is an interactive group of people joined together by a common interest. In a community, people can work together to achieve individual or collective goals. A community can be a powerful tool to communicate with your customers or build internal organizational communication to share knowledge. The breadth of purpose of community communication may range from general knowledge sharing to completing a specific task.

The advantages of a community include:

• Improved customer engagement
• Accelerated product development
• Increased customer satisfaction
• Increased transparency
• Decreased customer support costs
• Decreased feature failures

Plan a Community

A community can be a powerful communications tool however communities benefit from planning for their intended purpose. For more information about the organizational aspects of communities please contact Intland's professional services.

Learn from Open Source Communities

Like many open source development projects you can build a similar community around your projects.

Project administrators can fine tune the amount of visibility each user has on the project artifacts. Once the administrator sets up public access for a project other people become able to see project activities. Users might be able to see existing product bugs, report new ones and see the release plans for your project's future evolution by examining its requirements and change requests. They also can get involved in shaping the future of your product. Forums and Wiki pages allow free discussions of related topics and users are able to talk directly with the developers, if required.
The openness of your projects also drives your team to greater attention to quality and better documentation of the development process. The decision to make a project public must also take into account the additional stress the open nature of the project puts on the team. Generally speaking, most the activity generated by this stress is beneficial for the project, but some of it might not be.

See also Authentication and Access Control in codeBeamer, Basics: Projects, Roles, Groups, Members and Users and Managing Anonymous User Access

Organizing Projects for Communities

When you make your project public, CodeBeamer will allow portal members to browse or search your project with all its artifacts (Wikis, documents, trackers, reports etc.). Users can also send a join request to the project if they are interested in participating in it. With this mechanism one can build a community around a project in a similar way to many Open Source communities. This kind of Community support fosters inter-project communication, component sharing, artifact mining, and better reuse. By default a newly created project is private and so visible only to its members and completely hidden to other users. When making the project public there are two options:

• public project with join approval and
• public project with automatic join.

Choose your type of public project in the Project's Admin Tab, under the General options.

Set Default Role for New Members

The project administrator of a public project must decide which role new members should be assigned to. Usually this default role should provide limited, read-only access to the project. The predefined Customer role is often the most appropriate role because, in the default setup, it has the most restricted set of rights. Users' roles can be adjusted later to permit broader rights.

Allow Anonymous Access for Projects

See Managing Anonymous User Access