Berkus's Ten Ways to Destroy Community and Bacon's Art of Community

This was a great week for reviewing "community building" resources in my world. I discovered Josh Berkus's recent Java One presentation, "Ten Ways to Destroy Your Community", and I received my reviewer's copy of Jono Bacon's "The Art of Community". [srw — I was a pre-publication reviewer for Jono.]

Berkus's presentation is absolutely brilliant. After pointing out very tongue-in-cheek why your community is such a painful group of people (e.g. "They mess up your marketing plans by doing their own marketing and PR" or "They mess up your product plans with unexpected innovation"), he proceeds to give you a perfect run down of ten ways to be rid of them with excellent examples. In order:

1. Difficult Tools
2. Encourage Poisonous People
3. Don't Document Anything
4. Closed Door Meetings
5. Lots of Legalese
6. Bad Liaison
7. Governance Obfuscation
8. Screw Around with Licences
9. Stop Outside Committers
10. Be Silent

The sad part of this list is how true it is. While Josh picked examples from his experiences, too often you visit a site to evaluate a company-led (or consortia-led) open source project to find too many of these counter principles in play.

Jono's book was published last Summer. His lyrical metal prose conveys his brilliant experiences over past years in community involvement, then community development, culminating in one of the best led community examples around Ubuntu. While Jono's eleven chapters don't align neatly with Josh's ten weapons of mass distraction, there is method and madness to attack each of the problems (or hopefully to avoid them altogether).

1. Difficult Tools [Chapter 5]
2. Encourage Poisonous People [Chapter 9]
3. Don't Document Anything [Chapters 3-5]
4. Closed Door Meetings [Chapter 3,4,8]
5. Lots of Legalese[Chapter 8]
6. Bad Liaison [Chapter 11]
7. Governance Obfuscation [Chapter 8]
8. Screw Around with Licences [Chapters 1,2,8]
9. Stop Outside Committers [Chapters 4,8]
10. Be Silent [Chapter 3]

If you need a quick litmus test to check on your community, read the presentation. Once you [honestly] suspect there may be a problem [or two], dig into book. Enjoy.

Comments

[Corey Shields]

Berkus is one of best in open source. I haven't bet Jono but it is obvious that he gets it too, and that is there's more to open source success than just code. There are very real human aspects that get lost and forgotten because we're all collaborating virtually.

I saw Gentoo implode from poisonous people and anarchy. There were excellent coders in that community producing excellent code, but the best code in the world will never make it on its own. It is the -community- that eventually makes or breaks a project. Same holds true for corporate-led code.

(ok, there are still great coders working on that project, but you'll never see it back at the top of distrowatch and it will sadly never live up to its full potential)

I'm glad to see that so many people in the Ubuntu community respect Jono's words, gives me hope for longevity in that, and other, projects. :)