If you build it, they might come. We all want our open source projects to be widely adopted, but competition in the open source landscape is fierce. Reaching levels of notoriety and adoption akin to the likes of Linux, Rails, or WordPress is increasingly challenging amongst today's volume of seemingly never-ending options. How do you differentiate in a way that is meaningful? It's really about building a 'who', not just a 'what'.

Bree Thomas (@BreeThomas33) is a Developer at iTriage, and a recent graduate of gSchool by Jumpstartlab. She has a background in Brand Strategy/Marketing and blogs about experiences in both development and marketing at: http://www.nooblife.com/ and http://www.thebratblog.com/.