How do I spread awareness of my open source project? [closed]

Question

I've got a couple open-source projects on Codeplex (I'll link if someone asks, but otherwise, I'm not quite that shameless ;)), but I'm not really sure how to go about spreading the word or getting people to take notice. Any suggestions for attracting users/contributors?

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See also:

How to get users to your Open Source project

How do you promote/advertise/evangelize your open source project?

How to persuade people to contribute to an open source project?

Answer 1

Here are my 10 suggestions:

1. Interact with the community through forums, mailing lists, uservoice.com, bug tracker, IRC (server / client), etc. Communicate through blog, twitter, and mailing lists.

2. Give users the feel that the project is actively maintained through quick turn around for bug fixes, frequent releases, and ideally more than one developer.

3. Solicit user feedback as early as possible before implementing bigger features.

4. Reduce the friction through good documentation, easy installation, low bar to entry with less requirements (e.g. don't require latest version of .NET just because it is fun).

5. Maintain development / stable releases, let people trust that stable releases are releases stable.

6. Integrate with related projects - work with related projects to provide a better end to end experience. Working with other open source teams will eventually get you a reference on their site driving more traffic towards you.

7. Spend some SEO / analytics time, make sure than when people search for a software package that does X, then yours show up relatively high. Also understand your audience.

8. Build a testimonials page where you can capture positive community feedback.

9. Spot people who are contributing patches and invite them to join your team.

10. Localize your project where appropriate. There are some projects that specialize in providing translations for open source projects (e.g. Betawiki)

Answer 2

Blog about them. Release often. If you can, use them in a higher-profile project. Contribute to other projects to build up your reputation. Be very responsive to bugs/feature requests/etc. Keep your issue tracker up to date.

Answer 3

This isn't exactly spreading the word, but it will help your projects gain stature: provide good documentation -- well-written, detailed, complete, and above all up-to-date. Producing docs like that is a time-consuming pain in the ass, but it will help your projects enormously and lack of it will make people not want to use them. Given two projects, one carefully-documented and one with nothing but the docs generated by the language's automatic doc generator a lot of people will prefer the former even if it isn't quite as good.