Wednesday November 30, 2005 Inside-Out
My friend and colleague Jim Grisanzio was the person who first alerted me to an idea he eloquently develops in a recent posting about Community Managers. He said back at the start of the year that communities aren't something you message and control from the outside, they are something you join and influence from the inside. He's moving on now to talk of the dynamics of how one moves from an "us & them" mentality to an "it's all us" approach, and further to consider how collaborative communities are the only way one can work in a global, participative market.
One of the things the OpenSolaris community really had going for it from the start was that, pre-opening, there was already a distributed, collaborative community working on the Solaris source. On opening day, we weren't creating a new community outside Sun, or sending a few Sun staff out to join something. We were opening the doors so that anyone with the will and the skill could become part of the (now Open-)Solaris community.
Not every group is like that. As I discuss the future with various groups inside Sun, this is one of my diagnostics for how well-prepared a team's thinking is for going open source. The folk who are worried about "running programs to draw in the community", "crafting messages", "sending our engineers out to the community" and so on are the ones most likely to find the transition to open source hard. Hearing people talk about "the community" as something "out there" is diagnostic of pre-Participation Age thinking that will need to evolve.
