Zulip is a complete open source alternative to Slack, optimized for productivity.

It is also one of the fastest-growing open source projects out there, with hundreds of new contributors in the last year and more commits merged every week than Docker and Django combined.

Since Zulip was open sourced by Dropbox in late 2015, it has grown from just lead developer Tim Abbott to hundreds of contributors around the world in just 18 months.

The purpose of this talk is to share the reusable lessons we've learned from growing our open source project and its community, with a focus on topics like:

• Where the core developer(s) should spend their time
• Code review and avoiding overload
• Optimizing the individual development experience
• Optimizing the collaborative development experience
• Finding power users and contributors
• Turning contributors into serial contributors
• Building a sense of community
• Scaling workflows on GitHub
• Prioritization and communicating priorities
• Making the most of developer sprints