Open Source Community
Antipatterns
Ted Leung
Open 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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