Author: JP

Musing about opensource: The threat is stronger than the move

What do you do when you’re told to take it very easy, when you’re told to make “slow” a polysyllabic word? If you’re me, and you also have a deep-seated protestant work ethic in you, you struggle. Big time.

Well, that’s what I did for a little while last month, struggling to get past the denial stage. I really didn’t know how to do nothing. Then, come the new year, I had a Road To Damascus experience and then I settled down into an easy rhythm of eat-read-sleep-potter-about-aimlessly, interspersed with the real joy of spending time with my wife and kids. While on the subject of convalescence, my thanks to all who sent me get-well-soon messages. As you can see the messages are working…

Now to the point of this post.

As part of the pottering-about-reading-aimlessly time, I came across this post by James McGovern, whose blog I get to reasonably often.

Read the post, it’s worth it. James commented on a perception held by some developers that many opensource communities aren’t particularly welcoming, and that developers are put off joining as a result.
And it made me wonder.

I’ve always believed in a community participation rule of thumb, something I’ve written about before here and here. The numbers tell the story:

  • For every 1000 people who join a community:
  • 920 are lurkers, passive observers
  • 60 are watchers, active observers capable and willing to kibitz
  • 15 are activists, actually doing something
  • …and 5 are hyperactive, passionate about what they’re doing, almost to a point of obsession

And this is what I was musing about.

Does it really matter, the number of people who actively contribute to an opensource project? Is there something about the way opensource communities work, something that will always ensure that a very small number are the hyperactive core?

The more I think about it, the more I believe that there’s something important here. Linus’s Law is about eyeballs, not hands, and it’s for a reason:

  • At the heart of every successful opensource community is a small cottage industry. And it is this cottage-industry mindset that makes the community different from other “commercial” ones.
  • The core doesn’t have to scale. The core needs to behave in such a way that Linus’s eyeballs are attracted, and this is done by upholding the right values.
  • Jerry Garcia and gang only needed to make sure that Grateful Dead concerts had “taping rows”; the number of people who sat in them was not relevant (although they were full). In a weird kind of way, the core is the band. The tapers are the activists. The kibitzers are the roadies and volunteers.
  • Together with the audience, they formed a whole and vibrant community.
  • Not everyone needs to be on stage for the community to work. In fact there isn’t space.

It is the freedom of access, represented by the taping rows, that really matters. That’s what makes opensource opensource.

Or, to take a chess analogy:

The threat is stronger than the move.

It’s that time of year

It’s been an eventful year for me, what with changing jobs in March, changing firms in October, nearly moving house and then not, and finally having a heart attack a few weeks ago.

It’s been an eventful year for me, what with starting this blog in late February, and really feeling part of a small but close-knit community ever since.

It’s been an eventful year for me. I’ve learnt a lot, and you guys have been instrumental in that.
Thank you.

Have a great New Year.

More on Line Rider and on “wasting time”

Some of you were smitten by Line Rider, enough to bother to comment on my post :-)

You may find the wikipedia entry for Line Rider of some interest.

And if that doesn’t ring your bell, maybe this video will…..

Learning from my children: Take a look at Line Rider

My son Isaac showed me this site: It’s called Line Rider.

Take a look at it, play with it and see what you think. What it says is what it is. A tool that lets you draw lines, and then “play” what you’ve drawn; you get to watch while some squiggly creature “rides” the “line” that you drew.

After you’ve tried it a few times, and failed miserably, check your age. You must be over 25. That’s my guess.

Then go to this link, and choose any of the videos made, so that you can see what people have been able to do.

Somebody, I can’t remember who it was, called it Etch-A-Sketch for the YouTube Generation; for sure it is Web 2.0 meets simple graphics. What they don’t tell you is just how much fun you can have.

When I saw the video, the first thing that came to mind was Super Mario or Sonic The Hedgehog, there was something about the way the squiggle rode the line that was very reminiscent of the early video games. Maybe Generation M is already tuned in to expect those movements and I’m not.

But hey, there’s a weekend coming, a whole New Year to come after that, and I have only allowed myself four weeks to learn Spanish.

Enjoy Line Riding.

Musing about identity and related concepts, via the 5 Things meme

Quite a few people tagged me, but I felt it was reasonable to try the 5 Things thing out just once. And, amongst others, I tagged Ron Silliman. And Ron chose Jordan Davis as one of his 5.

Jordan has this to say, exercising his right by declining to pass the 5 Things on:

….forgive me for asking: who are you, anyway? who am I to you. That’s the flaw in the premise of the meme that gets me. Can’t say what someone doesn’t know if you don’t know who someone is.

I don’t think it’s just a flaw in the premise of the meme; it’s a flaw in the premise of how people, particularly in the West, perceive things like identity.

I spoke about it at reboot earlier this year during the Graveyard Slot, talking about things destined for death. And identity abd privacy as we knew them were on the list.

In many cultures identity is defined by what you stand for, what groups you belong to. Some of these groups may be based on simple things like geography or blood, but most such groupings are complex and form an integral part of identity.

As Chris and Doc and Dave reminded us many years ago, markets are conversations. Relationship before conversation. Relationship way way before transaction.

So in a way Jordan’s absolutely right. Without who are you and who am I to you the 5 things meme appears to have little meaning.

But Jordan is also slightly off track. There are many cultures that trust first, that welcome strangers into their midst, that believe in being open and transparent. These are good things to have, things we’ve lost.

We need to claw back some of the stuff we’ve lost. Stuff that hides under the bushel of identity and privacy and confidentiality.

There’s a line in one of my favourite films, Local Hero:

We don’t lock doors here.

That too is something we’ve lost. We need it all back.