Author Archives: Lars Kurth

About Lars Kurth

Lars Kurth is a highly effective, passionate community manager with strong experience of working with open source communities (Symbian, Symbian DevCo, Eclipse, GNU) and currently is community manager for xen.org. Lars has 9 years of experience building and leading engineering teams and a track record of executing several change programs impacting 1000 users. Lars has 16 years of industry experience in the tools and mobile sector working at ARM, Symbian Ltd, Symbian Foundation and Nokia. Lars has strong analytical, communication, influencing and presentation skills, good knowledge of marketing and product management and extensive background in C/C , Java and software development practices which he learned working as community manager, product manager, chief architect, engineering manager and software developer. If you want to know more, check out uk.linkedin.com/in/larskurth. Personally, Lars has a wide range of interests such as literature, theatre, cinema, cooking and gardening. He is particularly fascinated by orchids and carnivorous plants and has built a rather large collection of plants from all over the world. His love for plants extends into a passion for travel, in particular to see plants grow in their native habitats.

Viewing Communities as Funnels

It has been ages since I have had time to write a blog post. Last week, I decided to get my act together and start again. Of course the cold and wet summer in the UK also helps a bit. … Continue reading

Posted in Community | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

GSoC: first few lessons learned

For the first time this year I have been admin for a Google Summer of code mentoring organization. Now as Google has announced the students, and while my impressions are still fresh, it’s time to share some lessons. Don’t allow … Continue reading

Posted in Community | Tagged | 1 Comment

Getting on top of Social Networks

As community manager I should know better and regularly publish on the blog. Well, it’s been a very busy beginning of the year and taking over an existing community creates its own set of challenges. Besides community managers, I’d expect … Continue reading

Posted in Community | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Moving on to Pastures New

As the Symbian Foundation is changing to a licensing organisation with no staff, I am moving on. I will start a new role as open source community manager for XEN.ORG in mid January. I am looking forward to this exciting … Continue reading

Posted in Personal | Tagged , | 5 Comments

DevCo: Experiences saving a young community

In the last few weeks, my life and that of many of the people I have worked with for a year and a half, has undergone some drastic transformations. My employer, the Symbian Foundation, is changing from an open source … Continue reading

Posted in Community | Tagged , | 3 Comments

A model for building communities?

For some time I have been thinking now whether it is possible to express the business and people dynamics of building communities, in particular open source communities in terms of a model that is easy to understand by software engineers … Continue reading

Posted in Community | Tagged , | 1 Comment

On the Universe, Gravity & Twitter

For a while now, I have been thinking of writing a philisophical blog post on whether a year of Twitter usage has actually had a significant impact on my work life or the way how I generally use the internet.  … Continue reading

Posted in Personal | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Standing out in the crowd (part 3): keep your project or package visible

The first two posts in this series looked at how to market your open source project or package looking into the question what marketing is anyway and how to tell the world that you exist. After you have followed the … Continue reading

Posted in Community | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Standing out in the crowd (part 2): advertising your project or package

Last weeks post looked at how to market your open source project or package looking into the question what marketing is anyway, finding out who your audience is and understanding your own and your audiences needs. This is necessary groundwork … Continue reading

Posted in Community | Tagged , , , | 9 Comments

Standing out in the crowd (part 1): marketing your project or package

At OSCON and the Community Leadership Summit the question how you get noticed as an open source project (or more generally as a a community) was covered in a number of discussions and talks. A really good talk was Josh … Continue reading

Posted in Community | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments