Managing community contributors with Alya Abbott

Managing community contributors with Alya Abbott

From The Business of Open Source by Emily Omier

June 25, 2025 · 36 min · Episode 261

About this episode

Emily Omier talks with Alya Abbott about managing community contributors in open source projects.

This week on The Business of Open Source I talked with Alya Abbott , COO of Zulip , about managing community contributors. This is a hot topic for open source companies — and for that matter, open source projects in general, including those that aren’t being monetized in any way. It’s a bit of a third rail in the open source ecosystem to suggest that there’s a downside to community contributions, but there undoubtably is. At Zulip, they think about the contribution process as a product. They think about the contributor experience and making it as easy as possible for new contributors to get started. They even did user experience testing on the developer experience for contributors — and made changes as a result. And why does this even matter? Because when it’s done right, community contributors can end up increasing your development velocity. Especially on things like integrations, the community contributors can really push things forward. There’s much more to this episode, so check it out! And if you’d like more content about open source companies, or if you’re the leader of an open source company, join the mailing list for Open Source Founders Summit.

People in this episode

Host: Emily Omier

Guest: Alya Abbott

Topics covered

  • community contributors
  • open source
  • development velocity
  • user experience
  • contributor experience

Keywords

  • open source
  • community contributions
  • Zulip
  • developer experience
  • contributor process

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Zulip

More episodes of The Business of Open Source

Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the The Business of Open Source podcast page.