Alright, I didn't get more responses, so I think payout for invested time is the key issue.
For me, Podman is a key technology that could be running everywhere, including Mars rovers, including smart phones (let's face it, Apps are basically containers), etc. Everywhere where IoT can be used podman makes sense.
And the amount of IoT that surrounds us will just grow. So it's a huge project, even if it hasn't reached that scale yet in terms of daily work.
Therefore, I would say that the community interaction should also be thought of in these terms. And if I look at other big projects, they often have community office hours, where users can bring in discussion topics.
So the value of thinking big in terms of community management is huge.
But the personal time investment of individual people doesn't have to be. A few ideas:
(1) The work could be split up, like cleaning the kitchen in a shared apartment
(2) Users could be involved in the facilitation of individual sessions
(3) One could look for other companies that would be interested enough in this project's growth to add some headcount (e.g., big customers)
(4) One could find other companies that want to create something similar and keep an eye on what this project is doing (thinking Apple might be wanting to build their own container engine on their own kernel but make sure the CLI is almost identical)
(5) There might be other FOSS projects that have, or could have in the future, a high dependency on Podman's success, and therefore might be interested in sharing community management resources
(6) If we can think up an experiment that can show community traction (or even better: customer traction), and that experiment succeeds, then usually management is happy to add a headcount or two
So, it doesn't mean that people who are busy crunching bugs would have attend an online meeting every week.
What do you think about that? Do you have other ideas that I could add to the list?
Best,
Erik
PS: I have to admit that after only getting a response from Dan, I was a little frustrated. My main intention when I started this was trying to figure out if I can use my newly acquired Agile skills in the project. But I don't think I can transfer
these skills from colorful sticky notes to IRC messages. If someone has an idea who else might have tried something like that, I'm also curious to learn about it.
What I am doing now with that desire is I'm looking for communities that work more with audio-visual communication anyways. And maybe there's still some opportunity to combine both through (5) in the future.