This document outlines antipatterns that can harm open source communities. It discusses issues related to governance, communication, culture/environment, merit, decision making, leadership, balancing forces, and other concerns. Specific antipatterns mentioned include having too much or too little governance, keeping community operations private, being restrictive about approved communication channels, failing to actively pass on culture to newcomers, prioritizing rules over guidelines, making criteria for success vague, creating an unfriendly environment, believing merit can be absolutely measured, ignoring leadership needs, being partisan, making community building someone's job rather than developers, and centralizing by giving people turf. The document aims to help open source communities avoid these pitfalls.
2. What’s a good community?
• Level playing field
• Innovation happens elsewhere
• Diverse/Sustainable
• Hit by a bus number
• That human sense of community
11. 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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12. Rules not guidelines
• Insist on rules without principles
• Prefer rules and not principled guidelines
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13. 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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14. 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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15. Make criteria arbitrary or
vague
• for success, advancement, inclusion
• capricious, secret or otherwise arbitrary
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16. Keep it professional
• That’s a bunch of hooey
• Talk like a human not a droid or lawyer
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30. Be Partisan
• Make sure that one or more parties obtain the majority of the benefit /
benefit disproportionately
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31. Other
31 http://www.flickr.com/photos/p-s-e/2272958336/
32. Make community building
someone’s job
• Even better, make sure that somebody is not a developer
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33. 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
34. Fail to apply open source
tools to the governance itself
• Accountability for governance/foundation tasks
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35. 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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