In the last few years, the European Union public sector has taken strongly to free and open source (FOSS), at least as an enduser. The appeal is obvious: FOSS is cheap, good, and open for modification. Private sector institutions in Europe have also increasingly begun to set up development projects modeled on open source participatory communities: unlimited by the constraints of corporate walls or distance and based on merit.

But creating such a participatory community is hardly trivial. The basic problem lies with the logic and sequence of community formation. FOSS communities traditionally form organically, around code exchanged among peers. This is how Linux, Apache, and Perl formed, to name but three. Sponsored projects, which hope to gain from this free circulation of ideas, usually release code first, then seek to form a community to work on the released code. Mozilla.org and OpenOffice.org both have operated in this way. The timing in releasing the code clearly makes a difference in how a participatory community is to be formed.

This talk examines the basic logic underlying such sponsored participatory communities and suggests some basic strategies for success. The issues that will be discussed include:

• Governance, and what it means and how to set it up
• Developer outreach, and what this means in practice
• Marketing, and its meaning in a participatory community, especially an open source one

Examples (and counter examples) will be drawn from the community Suárez-Potts knows best: OpenOffice.org, as well as others.