OSiM
September 19, 2007 7:58 am GeneralI’m in Madrid this week for Open Source in Mobile – -it’s a decent CIO-type conference, and companies working with free software are well represented.
I gave a presentation yesterday on how to reconcile having a commercial team of developers working on your software, while trying to build a community. The major lesson is “be transparent, and let the community have control. And don’t forget that the community includes you.”
And that point – letting control go – *really* scares people around here. Because when people think of that, they’re thinking “I’m going to have to ship code I don’t want to on my devices”. That’s a non-sequitur, but it’s perhaps not easy to see why.
No-one can force you to ship code you don’t want to, or not to do work which is essential for your business. But when you are community building, you have to stop thinking of the project as your project.
What you need to do instead is have your development team engage (as individuals) the community to make sure that your voice is heard for the community roadmap. It’s entirely likely that the community leader will be someone working for you.
The code you ship can have a delta with that reference code that the community maintains. Sometimes your patches will be rejected, or you’ll have to remove things you don’t want. The whole point is to move the burden of maintaining that delta from the community (“It’s our code, but feel free to maintain a branch”) to you “You’re the bosses – but for reason X, we need to ship something different”).
It’s all about making sure that community members feel ownership of the project. If any of the things you do erode that, you’re damaging that community and preventing it from growing.
