2003-04-29 - Open Source Sucess Patterns
Reading the Blue Oxen paper called "An Introduction to Open Source". (download). It's an interesting study of two OpenSource communities, TouchGraph and SquirrelMail, much of it is obvious to anyone who has been involved in the community for any length of time, however their patterns for sucess at the end are interesting. All of these patterns ring a bell with my experiences with PersonalTelco, the most telling and unfortunate of them is that my abscence over the fall and recent burnout is probably partially responsible for my current frustrations.
Evolve the Community - It is extremely difficult to predict what kind of interest an open source project will attract. Designing an organizational structure for what might be, rather than what is will likely impede the project rather than facilitate it.
SquirrelMail's organizational structure and processes emerged over time. Its system of subprojects and project leads worked because the code was modularized, and there was already an active community of participants from whom to draw. Had Luke Ehresman, SquirrelMail's founder, tried to impose this structure when he first started the project, it likely would have failed, because the necessary roles would not have been clear at that point, and there were no candidates to whom to assign those roles.
Alex Shapiro, TouchGraph's creator, has not delegated CVS commit access to members of his communities, because he doesn't see the need, and he doesn't think his code is modular enough. He also recognizes that doing so would create unnecessary organizational overhead with no immediate benefits. Both projects have been reactive rather than proactive. They have allowed an organizational scheme to emerge, rather than attempting to impose one.
Lead by Example - To celebrate the one year anniversary of SquirrelMail, Ehresman wrote an essay describing the lessons he had learned. He noted that the more active the leader is, the more active the community will become. "A strong correlation exists between developer activity and my personal excitement and involvement in the project," Ehresman said. "Whenever I took a week or two off, not much development happened--on the flip side of that, when I was ecstatic about certain aspects of the project, developer response and activity was quite high. It is important that your developers see your enthusiasm so they can share in your excitement." As a corollary, Ehresman noted that participating on the project's public forums can have an important effect on a community. He said, "Being involved in the mailing lists is a never-ending job, but involvement as project leader is necessary! It helps a lot for users to see active involvement just as it's important for developers to see this".
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Users Talk to Developers - With both TouchGraph and SquirrelMail, users and developers are part of the same community. They interact on the same public forums, and in both cases, many users become active members of the community by answering other users' questions.
Not only are the communication barriers between users and developers small, the barrier for a user to become a developer is small. TouchGraph's most significant outside contributors were all TouchGraph users who found ways to improve TouchGraph's code. Several of SquirrelMail's current project leads, including overall lead Castello, initially joined the community as users, not developers.
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