My last session of OSCON yesterday was Danese Cooper’s “The Art of Community” panel talk with Karl Fogel, Jimmy Wales, Dawn Foster, Sulamita Garcia, Whurley, and Brian Behlendorf. This year Danese asked community oriented questions and let the various panel members jump in to answer the questions. Blogging panel presentations can be tricky since the exchanges between the panel members and even the audience fly back and for quite fast. I tried to capture the best questions and the best responses, but I’m not even going to claim that my coverage is anywhere near complete.

Danese started with: “Is it about the code or the community?”:
Brian: Open source software is comprised of people as it used to be. Microsoft detached people from software and peddled low quality software and established that as the norm. In open source, if you have a healthy community, quality software flows from it.

Danese: What is a healthy community?
- Karl: No killing.
- Dawn: Active and consistent participation indicates a healthy community. Some communities ebb and flow over time. Also, if the community moderates itself and doesn’t depend on one person to moderate/resolve conflict then your community is thriving. The community is also healthy if it embraces new people and doesn’t just point the to the FAQ.

Danese: What are your bad experiences?
- Karl: On the subversion development mailing list we had one fellow who posted 10-20 small posts per day. A lot of noise, yet this person never wrote a line of code. We analyzed the posts by this guy and who was responding and we showed that he was detracting core engineers form doing their important work. We called him up on the phone to ask him to stop. And he did — we never heard from him again.
- Jimmy: Difficult people are ones that do some good, but also cause trouble. You can get rid of people who do nothing but cause trouble, but when they also do good its not a simple case.

Danese: Is benevolent dictatorship dead?
- Brian: Its not (always) been the case where one person decides everything. Projects grow from one person into multiple person groups and the decision making process gets spread to more people as it happens.
- Karl: GNU emacs is a mess. The project has no rules, no docs, no customs. No one really knows what’s going on, no one knows what you can commit to and what you can’t. New developers get confused and influx into the project is hard. (Karl is saying saying this in support of another panel member stating that you need benevolent dictators).
- Whurley: iPhone bar camp has no organizers, only instigators since everyone participates. Some people tape down wires so no one trips. Some people organize the network. Everyone does something. There is not benevolent dictator.

Danese: Are communities becoming commodities? Are we setting up an accidental marketplace?
- Whurley: The value is not in the community. The value is in the committers. Several communities where the company has sold the product the community members decline since the founders have moved on. If the people who shape the community leave, there is a decline.
- Dawn: You can buy a community, but unless you foster it it will die.
- Jimmy: When we talk about buying a community it sounds sinister. If you think you are buying a community you are confused. if you are buying a community that is part of a business then you’re ok.

Danese: Can a company owned/controlled community do as well as an independent one? Postgres vs Mysql for instance.
- Brian: There is a sustainability question. Omidyar is shutting omidyar.net. You can take your data, but you can’t take the name or the community. That is going to break the community.
- Whurley: It comes down to balance. If the leader of a community gets distracted the communities can falter. Companies need to strike a balance between slapping logos on everything and maintaining a valuable community.
- Dawn: If its a company that makes all the decisions for the community, the community is no longer involved and the community will go away. If the community is more involved then it may survive.

I hope these snippets from the panel discussion provide some insight — the panel was awesome, but like I already mentioned, its hard to adequately cover a panel discussion.