Note: This post was co-authored by my good friend Thomas Graf.

My last post was around how to effectively contribute to an Open Source community. This post received a fair amount of traction, and I was happy with the conversation it created around Open Source contributions. There are plenty of people who hopefully benefited from this discussion.

Recently, I’ve been having some discussions with my friend Thomas Graf around upstream community engagement. Thomas recently shared with me the below, which are his words on how to engage and trust the upstream community. Thomas was kind enough to let me share these thoughts with everyone. I won’t summarize his words, but instead share them with you below.

I agree with everything Thomas says above. Open Source is about transparency and trust. Due to the fact that many projects have disparate developers from not only different companies but also different cultures, locales, and skill levels, developing trust is important to the very essence of Open Source projects. Trust is both in the form of giving as well as receiving trust. Consider trust to be the currency of Open Source development.

I’d like to thank Thomas again for sharing these words with me, and I am grateful to be able to share them with you as well.