Growing a Successful Project

Congratulations, you've just created your first project. At this point it's little more than a name and brief description, and a set of user groups. This topic shows you how to make it easier for others to find and use your project, and to make it more likely that they'll want to join it.

Each section below outlines a task that will help improve your project. While all of this is optional, we highly recommend that you select the project categories, license and icon, and ensure that the project description is clear and concise. We also suggest you keep your project active!

Select the public project configuration

If you already set the project as public when you created the project, well done! This is an ideal configuration for growing your project because it makes it visible to everyone, and easy for logged in users to contribute to and join.

If you didn't set your project as public, it's not too late. You can change the setting in Admin tab, General | Basic Settings.

Sometimes you might want people to know about your project but need to keep the "details" secret. One way to achieve this in a private project is to create a group with permissions SUMMARY_VIEW, PRIVATE_SUMMARY_VIEW and /or ALLOW_REQUEST_MEMBERSHIP, and assign to it the anonymous username. These allow anyone to find your project in explorer, see your Summary page and request membership (respectively), while still keeping the inner workings private. For an invite-only project you would remove the permission SUMMARY_VIEW so that the project would not be shown in explorer - but you could still send the URL to someone to view.

Apply categories

Adding appropriate categories makes it a lot easier for users to find your project (at time of writing there are 1000+ Nokia Developer Projects, so it's easy for any one project to be missed).

Categories are set in the Admin tab, General | Categorization section. There is a "general" category that covers platform, development framework, technology etc., and there are specific categories for License, Natural Language and Development Phase of your project. The general categories are the most important for searching, but we recommend you also set values for the other categories types.

For more information see ProjectsAdminCategories.

Choose a license

Failing to choose a licence is one of the worst things you can do to your project, because it means that developers don't know what they are allowed to do with your software. You might think "why bother, I'm just making it available to anyone to use how they want", but from other developer's perspective it's a risk - you could apply a restrictive license tomorrow and they might have to stop using your software, costing them time and effort.

If you don't have a strong opinion, we recommend the very permissive "New BSD" licence.

Licenses are set in the Admin tab, General | Categorization section. For more information see ProjectsAdminChooseLicense.

Update your project name, description and icon

The project name, description and icon are the first things that a users sees when they find or view your project - it is important that these make a good first impression.

While you already set the name and project description when you created the project we suggest you re-review in the Admin tab, General | Basic Settings section. The name and description should be concise, but sufficiently detailed to convey the project purpose. Avoid typographic errors!

The icon should ideally look professional and bright. You can upload an image in the Admin tab, General | Project Icon section.

Create a summary page

The "Summary" tab is the main portal into your project. A professional, informative and attractive page is more likely to encourage participation in your project.

The tab displays the content of the project wiki page named SummaryPage, which you can customise as you wish. In addition, the page contains most of the information you entered in the preceding sections, including project name, icon and description, along with category and license information.

While "beauty is in the eye of the beholder", we think that the most compelling summary pages in the wiki have had a few things in common:

• Informative description of the goals of the project
• Screenshots or video highlighting the project
• Compatibility and test information
• Links to key information about using or building the project
• Are simple enough that users will choose to read them

We provide Summary Page boilerplate text in ProjectsSummaryPageBoilerplate, along with links to some great project Summary pages for your inspiration!

Create featured downloads

One way to make it easy for your users is to add your software as a "Featured Download" on the Summary tab. This can be done in the Admin tab, Downloads System | Downloads section.

Keep your project active

Most users will discover your project in Project Explorer. If it's not a recent project, then making your project active is the only other way to move it up the search rankings (at time of writing).

More generally, developers are more attracted to active and dynamic projects than lethargic and dead ones. A small contribution on a regular basis will do more for keeping your project alive than a huge amount of work and then stagnation.

Communicate effectively

Nokia Projects provides discussion boards for you to communicate with your team and end-users.

The Announcements board is an effective way of communicating headline project news, for example new releases, to your team and end users. The last 5 messages posted on this forum are displayed in their own section on the Summary page.

By default you also get a discussion board for general discussions (you can create more if needed in the Administration tab, Forums section). In a public project any logged in user can post responses to this board. We highly recommend that you respond to all questions as this is a great way to engage with both your end users and your team.

Market and promoting your project

Most of the activities above contribute to marketing your project.

You can further market your project by promoting it outside of the project context. For example, if you're working on a project there is a good chance you can easily write a "how to" article on the main wiki re-using some interesting aspect of the project design and code. From this article you can then link to the project space for the example code, and show interesting images of your project in the wiki page.

There is nothing to stop you blogging, tweeting or using other social media to promote your project, and engage new developers and end users.

Populate your wiki

The wiki is provided for you to document your project. It is created with a WikiStart page that provides basic information on next steps for configuring your project (with some overlap with this article).

We recommend that you populate the start page with links to the key documents you're going to need to engage other developers. This might include:

• How to build the project
• Any restrictions on the build toolchain
• Contact information if you want to use other mechanisms than the discussion board to communicate

You can add any other information you like, although some documentation (e.g. design documentation) is harder to write in a wiki, so we're assuming you might use the "Files" section to make that available.