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
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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