International Community Building

A Case Study with FluentdKiyoto Tamura

@kiyototamura

Treasure Data, Inc.

Table of Contents

1. Self-Intro (aka disclaimers and jokes)

2. What’s Fluentd?

3. Fluentd’s journey and lessons learned

4. “Inverting” Fluentd’s lessons: how to foster an

OSS community in Japan.

Who?

• A freshman community

manager

• My “insights” = work in

progress

• What I know = US/Japan

Why you shouldn’t listen to me

• Bicultural perspectives

• Some results: Fluentd used

widely outside of Japan now

• What I learned probably

applies to other communities

Why you should listen to me

What’s Fluentd?

An open source data collector to simplify

and scale log management

Before: Chaotic Data Pipelines

After: Unified Logging Layer

Many Happy Users

Fluentd’s journey thus far

Street Cred Matters

•Fluentd’s original

developer

•Known for inventing

MessagePack

•Well-regarded in the

OSS community

Accidental Evangelist

Call me tagomoris.

Technical Validation

HUGE Mindshare

Outside of Japan?

The Language Barrier is Real

GREAT Content…in Japanese!

GREAT Conversations…in Japanese!

Language Choice is a Balancing Act

But We Got Some Stuff Right

•Docs were in English from Day 1

•Found a handful of early users outside of

Japan

• Integration with platform/OSS that are

already popular

Work(ed|ing) on Everything Else

•Support, Support, Support!

•Listen and react to feedback online

•Attending Events/Giving Talks

Promising Development!

“How can I do XYZ with Fluentd?”

4/1/2012 7/1/2012 10/1/2012 1/1/2013 4/1/2013 7/1/2013 10/1/2013 1/1/2014 4/1/20140

100

200

300

400

500

600

# of threads on Fluentd's mailing list

More Visitors from Everywhere

it’s your turn to get popular in Japan!

Street Cred Matters

Non-Accidental Evangelist

Content in English Gets Less Love

The O'Reilly Open Source Convention

(OSCON) is an annual convention for the

discussion of free and open source

software. It is organized by the publisher

O'Reilly Media and is held each summer in

the United States.

Content in English Gets Less Love

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Content in English Gets Less Love

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Start Conversations in Japanese

Get Some Stuff Right

•Have Docs Available in Japanese

•Provide support in Japanese

•Get help from the local communities early

and often

Promising Development!

It ain’t so hard!

“I think it's much easier to think

global from the start than to do

something only at home, so

doing things internationally was

an easy decision.” – Linda Liukas

Happy Community Building!