Narrative Infrastructure: Storytelling to Grow Open Source
summary
Claim: turning storytelling into narrative infrastructure (WriteTech Hub applied this across projects including Jenkins Wikimedia and Mautic) makes projects go from one-person activity to regular multi‑contributor work by answering “what we build, why, who for, and what counts.” Practical tools are concrete: README and contributing.md that state priorities and onboarding, plus issue and PR templates, changelogs, style guides, recorded check‑ins and onboarding routines. Kubernetes docs serve as the example. Generative tools help bootstrap content but require a human reviewer to avoid hallucinations.
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chapters (7)
- 0:00Introduction to narrative infrastructure
- 2:10Why open source projects struggle
- 7:50How narrative grows communities
- 9:17Backbone of storytelling
- 17:50Practices to keep stories alive
- 21:43Getting started with narrative
- 25:17Q&A on content and tools
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