Open Source Community Antipatterns Ted Leung Sun Microsystems 1 - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Open Source Community Antipatterns Ted Leung Sun Microsystems 1

What’s a good community? • Level playing field • Innovation happens elsewhere • Diverse/Sustainable • Hit by a bus number • That human sense of community

Categories • Governance • Communication • Culture/Environment • Merit • Decision Making • Leadership • Balancing Forces • Other 3

Governance 4 http://www.flickr.com/photos/twleung/2669753459/

Wrongly Sized Governance • Too little is bad • But too much is also bad 5

Don’t document • how the governance operates 6

Communications 7 http://www.flickr.com/photos/balakov/853643975/

Keep things private • This is the root of all evil when it comes to building communities 8

Be restrictive about approved media • It’s 2008... do you know what a blog is? • The innovator’s dilemma in governance and media 9

Culture 10 http://www.flickr.com/photos/twleung/2637756567/

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 11

Rules not guidelines • Insist on rules without principles • Prefer rules and not principled guidelines 12

Be privilege oriented • The opposite is to be responsibility oriented • The bad result is that people seek privileges as opposed to responsibility 13

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 14

Make criteria arbitrary or vague • for success, advancement, inclusion • capricious, secret or otherwise arbitrary 15

Keep it professional • That’s a bunch of hooey • Talk like a human not a droid or lawyer 16

Environment 17 http://www.flickr.com/photos/brighton/2154396202/

Make an environment unfriendly to • Under-represented groups • Women • Non-Caucasion people • Non-English speakers 18

Don’t be respectful • This should be an explicitly stated norm 19

Geographical Colocation • is an antipattern. Period. 20

Merit 21 http://www.flickr.com/photos/netsui/1448181277/

Believe that merit • is absolute and absolutely measurable • can be defined along a single or small number of dimensions 22

Don’t recognize Merit • or do it slowly

Decision Making 24 http://www.flickr.com/photos/denverjeffrey/2196784972/

Use lots of procedures • Don’t explain how decisions get made • Have different decision making styles/procedures for different contexts 25

Leadership 26 http://www.flickr.com/photos/lumaxart/2137729430/

Ignore the need for leadership • “I don’t think that word means what you think it means” 27

Try to “manage” • Managing != leading 28

Balance Forces 29 http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikeautry1/644553134/

Be Partisan • Make sure that one or more parties obtain the majority of the benefit / benefit disproportionately 33 30

Other 31 http://www.flickr.com/photos/p-s-e/2272958336/

Make community building someone’s job • Even better, make sure that somebody is not a developer 32

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

Fail to apply open source tools to the governance itself • Accountability for governance/foundation tasks 34

Centralize: Give people turf • The Starfish and the Spider • The trouble starts when there are resources to manage/allocate • Property rights (too much ownership) 35

Questions? Ted.Leung@Sun.com