Setting the record straight

My musings on a post by James McGovern attracted a number of comments, and I want to set the record straight:

The only real point I wanted to make was that opensource communities are not defined by the size of their core. That there will always be a number of people more active than others. And that this is not wrong.c Openness is about equality of access and opportunity, and not measured by the actual number of participants.

I promise to return to some of the other comments later. But while I’m seeking to set the record straight, there was one other thing buzzing around my head while I was in hospital:

As a result of this interview,  a number of you commented that I seemed to separate creative people and thinkers from doers and whatever. I made no attempt to separate human beings.

The only point I wanted to make was that blogs suited thinking, wikis suited workflow and reference, and IM suited wisdom-of-crowds problem-solving. An individual is able to use all three modes of conversation.

Enough said.

Plus ca change….

Finally managed to give the blog its much-needed makeover. As with anything else in this blog, it’s “provisional”, a work-in-progress. I hope to get everything done by the end of February, as Confused celebrates being a year old.

The glossary that some of you requested is nearly ready and will be available from next week.

LibraryThing will also be reinstated next week.

Yes I did bring back Snap Preview, which some of you liked and others didn’t. Why did I do that? Because they now have end-user opt-out, which is an eminently sensible thing for them to have done.

My thanks to Chris Locke for all his help, he made all this possible while I continue to recuperate. Incidentally, I hear he now has some time on his hands, so if you have things you need to get done that need his unique skills then you know where to go. He’s always been there for me when I’ve needed him, and he gets on with things like only he can. Especially when RageBoy lets him.
Comments welcome as ever. Particularly things you don’t like.

You ain’t seen nothing yet

Visualisation tools are going to become more and more important over time, as we struggle with problems like “information overload”, problems that have been with us so long they’ve become cliches.

Statistics are made to lie. The lies stick because Innumeracy is rife. Despite everything that John Allen Paulos has done. And Powerpoint, usually bad Powerpoint, rules over all. What makes the innumeracy unbearable is the fact that poor visualisation techniques are then used to propagate the lies.

A sorry state of affairs? Well, that’s why I found this representation of visualisation methods uplifting.

Don’t just look at the table. Run your cursor over it. Move it from element to element. See what can be done. We need ontologies and topologies like this one to help us work out what to do. Thanks to Cory for the find.

As if I need an excuse to mention the BTO track.

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.