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Wednesday June 15, 2005
Is there a community life cycle? The other day I read this article with quite a bit of interest. In the article, Matt Asay asks some pretty interesting questions about what the "open source" community is today. Lately Ubuntu is getting quite a bit of attention. What really sparked my thought around community life cycle is the article in combination with the newly forming OpenSolaris community.
I think it was Tim Bray who said [I'm paraphrasing heavily] that blogs discuss the here and now . So if you look at a blog over time (or the blogosphere in general), it is a constantly evolving discussion ( or set of discussions). It's a moving window of conversation. IMHO, communities behave in a similar manner. I think there are lots of reasons communities form, change in popularity, and perhaps even dissipate. With communities, however, it is a "macro discussion" based more on participation with a longer time scale.
Communities form from common interests with a goal in mind. The goal could be a product or social agenda (not meant in a negative way). Communities change in popularity for many reasons, be it politics, "freshness" of ideas, external forces, etc.
Communities can also dissipate due to lack of participation because the conversation goes elsewhere or perhaps the community goal was accomplished. Perhaps the need simply goes away. I'm not sure a community has to enter this phase. The community could simply be a solid medium for ongoing discussion and participation.
As of yesterday, OpenSolaris has entered the initial phase of the lifecycle. The greater Linux community (which consists of many communities on different levels) is well beyond this. The goals of Linux and OpenSolaris are similar. They are platforms where individuals can express their ideas and others can leverage them. These two communities differ in how they want to accomplish this (e.g. their licenses).
Just because one community enters the "creation phase" doesn't mean others have to enter the "dissipation phase". At the same time, a successful community doesn't obviate the need or desire for others. I, for one, will continue to participate in many communities, including Linux (desktop) and OpenSolaris.
(2005-06-15 07:34:42.0) Permalink Comments [2]
A good gauge of dissipation is to look at the number of hollowed out projects just rotting on sourceforge. Even some of the name brand open source projects, like mozilla, are having trouble keeping developers engaged.
Sun needs to stay focused on the core OS and leave the rest for others. If not, their resources will become spread too thin.
Posted by bill on June 15, 2005 at 09:40 AM PDT #
If you look at History, expecially in other cultures, patience and "the time of things" have a different meaning and communities (not just I.T. communities but, communities in general) usually are organized in completelly different ways. The Solaris community has been alive for so many years that stopped making noise just to prove it's active. Opensolaris will put it in the mouthes of the world and speed up the pace but, we've been here for longer than most.
Posted by Jaime Cardoso on June 15, 2005 at 12:20 PM PDT #