Safe as Milk

Hello Neary Consulting

April 6, 2008 7:33 pm Dave Neary freesoftware, work

So, never let it be said that I am original when it comes to thinking up names.

I finally put the website for my company, Neary Consulting, online earlier this week. There’s not much there for the moment, but I have written before about what I expect my core activity to be: helping companies rock as community members.

Two situations come to mindimmediately.

• You have a free software product, and you’re having trouble building up a community around it. 95% of the contributions coming into the project are from your employees, and you’re spending a bunch of resources on community liaison people who don’t seem to be getting many new contributors in.
• You have a hacker working on some free software that you’re using in your products. Every change you ask him to make seems to take longer, since he has to maintain a separate branch for all the work that he’s doing. Once every few months, he comes to you and insists that you should update to the latest version of the upstream project, and every upgrade seems to introduce new interesting bugs, and causes a few regressions, as the merge always takes a few weeks to get right.

In both these situations, the problem is likely to be that you’re not interacting well with the people outside your company. Your hacker isn’t working on getting his work upstream, or doesn’t understand the changes which might conflict with his work. Or your free software project isn’t taking off because most of your team don’t understand this community stuff much, and anyway, didn’t you created the community liaison guy in the first place so that they wouldn’t have to?

I’m caricaturing, of course, but many organisations will recognise themselves in these two scenarios. And I think I can help make things better in both cases. Not perfect, but better. How? By helping engineers and managers understand community dynamics, and work to align their investments, expectations and development practices to get the most out of their interactions with free software communities.