Safe as Milk

What community?

October 6, 2011 8:00 pm Dave Neary community, General, gnome, maemo, work

With the announcement of Tizen (pronounced, I learned, tie-zen, not tea-zen or tizz-en) recently, I headed over to the website to find out who the project was aimed at. I read this on the “Community” page:

The Tizen community is made up of all of the people who collectively work on or with Tizen:

• Product contributors: kernel/distribution developers, release managers, quality assurance, localization, etc.
• Application developers: people who write applications to run on top of Tizen
• Users: people who run Tizen on their device and provide feedback
• Vendors: companies who create products based on Tizen
• Other contributors: promotion, documentation, and much more

Anyone can contribute by:

• Submitting patches
• Filing bugs
• Developing applications
• Helping with wiki documentation
• Participating in other community efforts and programs

Wow! That’s a diverse target audience, and a very wide ranging list of ways you can help out. But is it really helpful to scope the project so wide, and try to cater to such a wide range of use-cases from the start? And is the project at a stage where it even makes sense to advertise itself to some of these different types of users?

I have talked about the different meanings of “maintainer” before, depending on whether you’re maintaining a code project or are a package maintainer for a distribution. I have also talked about the different types of community that build up around a project, and how each of them needs their own identity – particularly in the context of the MeeGo trademark. I particularly like Simon Phipps’s analysis of the four community types as a way to clarify what you’re talking about.

For Tizen, I see between three and five different types of community, each with different needs, and each of which can form at different stages in the life-cycle of the project. Trying to “sell” the project to one type of community before the project is ready for them will result in disappointment and frustration all round – managing the expectations of people approaching Tizen will be vital to its long-term success, even if it opens you up to short-term criticism. Unless each of these communities is targeted individually and separately, and at the right time, I am sceptical about the results.

“Upstream” software developers

The first and most identifiably “Open Source” family of communities will be the software developers working on components and applications which will end up in the core of Tizen. For the most part, these communities exist already, and Samsung and Intel engineers are working with them. These are the projects we commonly call “upstreams” – projects you don’t control, but from whom code flows into your product.

In other cases, code will originate from Intel and/or Samsung. In the same way that Buteo, oFono and the various applications which were developed for the MeeGo Netbook UX were very closely associated with MeeGo, there will be similar projects (sometimes the same projects) which will have a close association with Tizen. Each of these projects will have their own personality, their own maintainers, roadmaps, specs – and each of them should have their own identity, and space to collaborate and communicate.

Communities form around programming projects not because of the code, but because of a shared vision and values. Each project will attract different people – the people who are interested in metadata and search are not the same as the people who will be passionate about system-wide contact integration. Each project needs its own web space, maintainers, bug tracker, mailing list, and wiki space. Of course, many projects can share the same infrastructure, and a lot of the same community processes (for things like code governance), and for projects closely related to Tizen, we can provide common space to help create a Tizen developer community in the same way there’s a GNOME developer community. But each community around each component will have its own personality and will need its own space.

At the level of Tizen, we could start with an architecture diagram, perhaps – and for each component on the architecture diagram, link to the project’s home page – many of the links will point to places like kernel.org, gnome.org, freedesktop.org and so on. For Tizen-specific projects, there could be a link to the project home page, with a list of stuff that needs to be done before the component is “ready”.

Core platform packagers, testers, integrators

Once we have a set of components which are working well together, we get to the heart of what I think will be Tizen’s early activity – bringing those components together into a cohesive whole. Tizen will be, basically, a set of distributions aimed at different form factors. And the deliverable in a distribution is not code or a Git tag, it’s a complete, integrated stack.

The engineering skills, resources and processes required to integrate a distribution are different to those of a code project. Making a great integrated Linux platform is obviously difficult – otherwise Red Hat would not be making money, and Ubuntu would not have had the opportunity to capture so much mind-share. Both Red Hat and Canonical do something right which others failed at before them.

Distributions attract a different type of contributor than code projects, and need a different set of tools and infrastructure to allow people to collaborate.At the distribution level, it is more likely you will be debating whether or not to integrate a particular package or its competitor than it is to debate whether to implement a feature in a specific package. Of course, it is possible to influence upstream projects to get specific features implemented, not least by providing developer resources, and there will be a need for some ambassadors to bridge the gap to upstream projects. And it is possible for a distribution to carry patches to upstream packages if that community disagrees. But in general, not much code gets written in distributions.

What the distro community needs and expects is infrastructure for continuous integration, bug tracking software, a way to submit and build software packages, good release engineering, an easy way to find out what packages need a maintainer (see Debian’s WNPP list  or Ubuntu’s “need-packaging” list for examples) and a way to influence what packages or features are included in future releases (see Fedora or Ubuntu for examples). They also want tools to allow packaging, testing and  deploying the integrated distribution – for an embedded distro, that might mean an emulator and an image creator, perhaps.

Vendors and carriers

Communities of companies are worth a special mention. Companies have very different ways of working together and agreeing on things than communities of individuals. I was tempted to just roll vendors into the “Platform integrators” community type, but they are sufficiently different to be considered another type of community. Vendors have different constraints and motivations than individual contributors to the platform, and we should be aware of those.

Vendors like to have a business relationship – some written agreement that shows where everyone stands. They have a direct relationship with people who buy their hardware, and have an interest (potentially in conflict with other communities) in owning the user relationship – through branded application stores, UI and support forums, for example. And since vendors are typically working on hardware development in parallel with software development, they care a lot about a reliable release schedule and quality level from the stack. Something that companies care about which individuals usually don’t are legal concerns around working with the process – do they have patent rights to the code they ship? Are they giving up any of their own potential patent claims?

3rd party application developers

Application developers don’t care, in general, whether the platform is open source or closed, or developed collaboratively or by one party (witness the popularity of Android and iOS with application developers). What they do care about are developer tools, documentation, and the ability to share their work with device users and other application developers. Some application developers will want to develop their applications as free software, and it is possible to enable that, but I think the most important thing for application developers is that it’s easy to do things with your platform, that there are good tools for developing, testing and deploying your application, that your platforms APIs are enabling the developer to do what he wants, and that you are providing a channel for those developers to get their apps to users of your platform.

An application developer doesn’t want to have to ship his software to 5 different app stores on every release – in contrast to vendors, he would like a single channel to his market. Other things he cares about are being able to form a relationship with his users – so app stores need to be social, allow user ratings and comments, and allow the author to interact with his users. Clear terms of engagement are vital here too – especially for commercial application developers. And application developers are also another type of community – they will want to share tips and tricks, code, and their thoughts on the project leaders in some kind of app developer knowledge base.

Device users

There is another potential community which I should mention, and that is users of your platform – typically, these will be users of devices running your platform. It should be possible for engaged users to share information, opinions, tips & tricks, and interesting hacks among each other. It should also be possible to rate and recommend applications easily – this is in the interests of both your user community and your application developer ecosystem.

OK, so what?

Each of these community types is different, and they don’t mix well. They mature at different rates. There is no point in trying to build a user platform until there are devices running your platform on the market, for example

So each type of community needs a separate space to work. There is no point in catering to a 3rd party application developer until you have developer tools and a platform for him to develop against. Vendors will commit to products when they see a viable integrated platform. And so on.

What is vital is to be very clear, for each type of community, what the rules of engagement are. As an example, one company can control the integration of a platform and the development of many of its components (as is the case for Android) and everyone is relatively happy, because they know where they stand and what they’re getting into. But if you advertise as an open and transparent project, and a small group of people announce the decisions of what components are included or excluded from the stack (as was the case in MeeGo), then in spite of being vastly more open, people who have engaged with the project will end up unhappy, because of a mismatch between the message and the practice in the project.

So what about Tizen? I think it is a mistake to announce the projects as a place to “submit patches, report bugs and develop applications” when there is no identifiable code base, no platform to try, and no published SDK to develop against. By announcing that Tizen is an Open Source platform, Intel and Samsung have set an expectation for people – and these are people who have gone through the move to MeeGo under two years ago, and who have seen Nokia drop the project earlier this year. If they are disappointed by the project’s beginnings because the expectations around the project have been set wrong from the offset, it could take a long time to recover.

Personally, I would start low-key by announcing an architecture diagram and concentrating on code and features that need writing, then ramp up the integrator community with some alpha images and tools to allow people to roll their own; finally, when the platform stabilises roll out the developer SDK and app store and start building up an application developer community. But by aiming too big with the messaging, Tizen runs the risk of scaring some people away early. Time will tell.