Monday May 01, 2006
Monday May 01, 2006
I'm really interested in what makes an OSS community attractive to the masses. At Sun we talk a lot about the fact that developers don't buy things they join things - like OSS communities. What are they looking for? What things are key? I'm not much of a developer these days, but I do participate in OSS communities and what attracts me is products that work and products that evolve (i.e. gain real new functionality that I want and can use so my life gets easier). That's why I love using Firefox, Thunderbird, MySQL and even Blogger.
We were talking to the Redmonk boys (James Governor, Stephen O'Grady and Michael Cote - these guys are good by the way) recently and some of the keys we got from them (my words, not theirs) included:
- Embrace contribution as much and in as many ways as possible
- Make it available, don't make it perfect
- Look for ways to enable cross community communication/involvement
- Focus on lifecycle, management and integration
- Plug into the volume opportunity
- Keep it simple
So what is it about the community/communities you participate in that makes it worthy of your time and energy? Let me know.
Thanks for the kind words. I know I had a good time talking with you guys and I'm excited to see what comes next on your end ;)
One of the common themes in the list above is promoting transparency: code in the clear as soon as possible, email lists and discussions in the open, and the sort of evolving documentation that wikis enable. Transparency is great for software because he helps limit all the lengthy, subjective discussions you have: when all the information is available, it's harder to control the conversation by hiding key facts.
That is, transparency promotes better communication.
Posted by Cote' on May 02, 2006 at 09:37 AM CDT #