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Open Source Community Antipatterns

Ted LeungSun Microsystems

What’s a good community?

• Level playing field

• Innovation happens elsewhere

• Diverse/Sustainable

• 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

• Other

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Governance

http://www.flickr.com/photos/twleung/2669753459/

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Wrongly Sized Governance

• Too little is bad

• But too much is also bad

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Don’t document

• how the governance operates

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Communications

http://www.flickr.com/photos/balakov/853643975/

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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 2008... do you know what a blog is?

• The innovator’s dilemma in governance and media

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Culture

http://www.flickr.com/photos/twleung/2637756567/

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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

http://www.flickr.com/photos/brighton/2154396202/

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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. Period.

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Merit

http://www.flickr.com/photos/netsui/1448181277/

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Believe that merit• is absolute and absolutely measurable

• can be defined along a single or small number of dimensions

Don’t recognize Merit

• or do it slowly

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Decision Making

http://www.flickr.com/photos/denverjeffrey/2196784972/

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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

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lumaxart/2137729430/

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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

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikeautry1/644553134/

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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

http://www.flickr.com/photos/p-s-e/2272958336/

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Make community building someone’s job

• Even better, make sure that somebody is not a developer

Hire outsiders who have never worked together

• It’s all about trust

• Trust can’t happen without alignment

• Alignment is hard to achieve than we think

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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)

Questions?

Ted.Leung@Sun.com