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Open Source Community Antipatterns

Ted LeungOpen Source Applications Foundation

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What’s a good community?

• Level playing field• Diverse/Sustainable

–Innovation happens elsewhere–Hit by a bus number

• That human sense of community

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Categories

• Governance• Communication• Culture/Environment• Merit• Decision Making• Leadership• Balancing Forces

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Governance

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Wrongly Sized Governance

• Too little is bad• But too much is also bad

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Fail to document clearly

• how the governance operates

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Communications

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Keep things private

• This is the root of all evil when it comes to building communities

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Be restrictive about approved media

• It’s 2007... do you know what a blog is?

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Culture

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Don’t actively pass the culture on

• Fail to inculcate culture / way of doing things–leave it undocumented–Don’t actively mentor newcomers

• Say “how” but not “why”• The Starfish and the Spider:

–The unstoppable power of leaderless organizations– Ori Brafman and Rod. A Beckstrom

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Rules not guidelines

• Insist on rules without principles• Prefer rules and not principled guidelines

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Be privilege oriented

• The opposite is to be responsibility oriented• The bad result is that people seek privileges as

opposed to responsibility

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Build a talk-o-cracy not a do-ocracy

• Doing is more important than talking• Talker-not-doer’s are a DOS against the

community

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Make criteria arbitrary or vague

• for success, advancement, inclusion• capricious, secret or otherwise arbitrary

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Keep it professional

• That’s a bunch of hooey• Talk like a human not a droid or lawyer

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Environment

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Make an environment unfriendly to

• Under-represented groups• Women• Non-Caucasion people• Non-English speakers

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Don’t be respectful

• This should be an explicitly stated norm

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Geographical Colocation

• is an antipattern

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Merit

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Believe that merit

• is absolute and absolutely measurable• can be defined along a single or small number

of dimensions

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Don’t recognize Merit

• or do it slowly

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Decision Making

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Use lots of procedures

• Don’t explain how decisions get made• Have different decision making styles/

procedures for different contexts

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Leadership

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Ignore the need for leadership

• “I don’t think that word means what you think it means”

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Try to “manage”

• Managing != leading

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Balance Forces

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Be Partisan

• Make sure that one or more parties obtain the majority of the benefit / benefit disproportionately

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Other

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Make community building someone’s job

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Fail to apply open source tools to the governance itself

• Accountability for governance/foundation tasks

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Centralize:Give people turf

• The Starfish and the Spider• The trouble starts when there are resources to

manage/allocate• Property rights (too much ownership)

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Questions?

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