Mailing the story:

Building a community is at the core of any free and open source software (FOSS) project, but few projects have faced challenges equal to Fedora's and openSUSE's efforts to create FOSS communities around formerly commercial projects, or Ubuntu's efforts to manage growth in a widely popular distribution. How to define communities, how to encourage participation from non-programmers, what community values to foster -- these are questions that community leaders from these projects have had to struggle with. Their attempts to answer the questions provide guidance to others trying to build communities within FOSS.