The last session of Thursday for me here at OSCON were the “The Art of Community” lightning talks where every speaker gets only 5 minutes to give their talk. Projected behind the speaker is a giant clock that shows how much time the speaker has left and the audience makes a nasty buzzing sound when time is up. Enforced with little mercy, this format allowed 8 speakers give their nutshell experiences with open source communities in 45 minutes.
I won’t cover all of these excellent speakers since the information density is amazingly high! I’ll paraphrase the key points of a few of the speakers and highlight the most important messages.
Carl Fogel, the author of Producing Open Source Software, spoke about how the subversion community forces its committers to write detailed commit messages. The person checking in code must clearly state which files where changed and what was done. If they check-in is a patch from someone else the committer must state who the patch was from and who had reviewed the patch. Using these commit messages the project feeds their web based contribulizer tool that provides a detailed history on which people have committed what changes to the project. This provides loads of useful information for deciding which people should get commit access in the future. The irony is that by making people do more work they actually bring the community together by making more information about the project available to the community.
Zak Greant talked about how corporations should communicate with the OSS communities in a coherent fashion. The first step is to publish a set of principles that outline how the company will talk to the community. Next, the executive staff needs to support these principles. Without sign off from the executive team the company may send mixed messages to the community. Zak continued on to talk about how the company must address the entire community, and not some subset. Having people who only know a few people from the community make decisions that affect the entire community may send inconsistent messages to the community. Finally, you need to matter to one another and engage people by building bridges between the company and the community.
Mitchell Baker, the Chief Lizard Wrangler for the Mozilla Corporation talked about how companies ask her how they can attract and engage open and passionate people. Companies see the benefit of open source and open strategies and want to instill this feeling into their own company. Mitchell’s response is that these corporations need to let go some aspect of control, so that the people in the company can take ownership and feel empowered. Letting go of control invites people to make a space their own and let their passion involve them. However, you need to take into account that people will do things their own way that may be different from how you would’ve done something. Mitchell calls this extreme delegation and warns people to not micro-manage this process. You need to create a space and let people’s passion flow naturally without interfering. In the end you give up control, but gain more involved people who feel a greater sense of ownership.
Geir Magnussen, an apache developer, talked about the role of community inside of apache. Apache’s approach emphasizes community over code — if you have a great community, the community creates great code. Technical leadership and community leadership become self managing where a benevolent dictator or community despot is not needed to make decisions. As a community leader you want to delegate tasks to the point of putting yourself out of a job. Humility and even letting others take credit for your work all bolster community. As was previously mentioned in one of the keynotes, a great leader is someone who gets no credit for the accomplishments of the community. The community will feel that it did the job themselves without the leaders which is the ultimate community empowerment. Leaders also need to make sure that people understand their vision and that there are no fissures or gaps in the community that can have potentially destructive consequences.
These were only half of the talks — I’m amazed at how much information these speakers managed to pack into five minutes. Thanks everyone!
