Enabling Your Community

We get to have a fascinating view into many different communities here at the OSL. Every community has its bits that make it amazing and at the same time dysfunctional. That said, every community we are lucky enough to host here is always moving forward.

One of the most interesting differences in many of the communities here is the ability to leverage “all comers” to a project. Gentoo has been particularly good at this as has Mozilla. There is something about being able to not only make use of the people streaming into your project but be able to get them to contribute that is critical to the growth of a project.

This comes back to “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” and ESR’s musings on how Linus has been so successful over the years. I really believe that you have to delegate/trust first and ask questions later. I’m not saying you blindly accept patches from *@microsoft.com into the kernel. I’m saying go with your gut, trust people and enable them to make the project better. Linus has said on several occasions he does simply because he is lazy; maybe we should all be so lazy.

One of the most fascinating projects to date I have seen is SpreadFirefox.com that the Mozilla Foundation sponsors and we host. Here we have a community that has formed by people that are excited about using and spreading the word about Firefox. The MoFo loves the project because it is a fantastic way for people excited about Firefox but not developers to be able to contribute to the project. In addition, it is a great way for people to get involved with Mozilla while being able to build their own personal brand. They get ownership because they aren’t necessarily doing some dirty work handed down to them from someone up-on-high. You can direct the community but you simply have to embrace it to succeed. Trying to stifle it by imposing your “vision” for a project will only make it fail.

We have been working with some folks from the OpenOffice project about hosting an instance of www.spreadopenoffice.org. For OO, I see this as a great way to really spread the word about OpenOffice and ramp up for v2.0 to hit the streets. Looking at OO’s value, its even greater than Firefox in the sense that you’re talking about being able to save tangible dollars in an organization with the replacement of competing products.

Discussions have been slow going. Many of the folks in the OpenOffice community see it as splintering their current marketing efforts and possibly taking away from the project as a whole. I view the possibility of SOO.org as a great way to spread the word about what a great product OpenOffice is, to channel the efforts of those who can’t develop and generate a butt-load of press for a project that greatly deserves it.