eaves.ca: why collaborative skills matter in open source
sethb
· 7 months ago
whoa, this is terrific post!
one question: do hierarchies that are built on merit and performance (like mozilla's meritocratic nature) foster collaboration early on so all can participate? i may be missing your point, but was trying to think about how mozilla fosters success in its community. it seems that a new developer will find a level of credibility and acceptance at mozilla by showing what problem he or she solved with code and how it was done, but not necessarily through collaboration. so, a new developer has to present all that he or she does before actually reaching out for help...just to get in the door...
does building a community on meritocracy create a barrier that is an initially very high transaction cost? and, because there is that initial transaction cost, does it persist throughout the culture to try to climb the ranks of the meritocracy?
David Eaves
· 7 months ago
Seth - I want to be careful commenting since I'm not a coder and what I've learned comes through my conversations with friends within the Mozilla community. Moreover, I don't want my comments to be seen as criticism of how the community is structured - Mozilla is an amazing beast, I'm focused on how we can further improve, and learn from, it.
I think you do hit on a point here. That the initial barrier to entry is high, and there is a risk that, for some, credibility only comes by presenting completed solutions and that reaching out before then means you will struggle to get help or acceptance within the community. This could be a barrier hindering community growth and participation. Moreover, this could impact the culture and structure of the meritocracy by self-selecting community members who value work that is completed and who themselves tend to share their work when it is in a finished form.
Jeremy Vernon
· 7 months ago
While it's difficult to argue the success of products like FireFox, Apache's HTTP server or IBM Canada's Eclipse which act as platforms into which an individual can plug whatever she feels like - it's worth mentioning that they all have a high-transaction cost core platform onto which the "swarm" is built.
The ability to functionally decompose the software architecture is determined largely by the kind of system you're building - as open source grows to fill every niche the kind of software that can be built in the "tiny widgets loosely joined" method shrinks. Which is why those monolithic open source projects that already exist are so impressive - Linux kernel, WINE, the W3C corpus, PHP, Java, etc.
Mozilla's BeSpin (which looks alot like a Web 2.0 version of Sun's Enterprise IDE) is a step in the right direction - code editing becomes an online collaborative (rather than offline cooperative) process. It's Google Docs for Code.
The next step is to do a wiki-IDE...
Smansonsinger
· 7 months ago
David
Have a look at one of my favourite old books written by Eric Jantsch called "The self-organizing Universe" It is a superb treatise from the philosophy of science genre looking for meta-theories of change. Written while he was at Berkeley in the 1970's it has not lost its hold on me as a way of understanding how we respond to change from neutron splitting to social organization. I might be able to find you a copy if you do not have access to one at UBC or SFU.
Warm regards, Sharon
David Eaves
· 7 months ago
Sharon - thank you. Let me see if I can locate a copy.
Tariq
· 7 months ago
Hi David,
I'm seeing a bit of a gap here, and hoping you can clarify or help me out. The title of the post is "why collaborative skills matter", but there was little mention of what those actual skills are, other than a need to negotiate and/or focusing on the reduction of transaction costs. Collaborative skills are one of many components that make up soft-skills or interpersonal skills - a crucial element of successful collaborative/cooperative engagement. On something as specific as coding for firefox or open source software, that require little person-to-person interaction, I suppose interpersonal skills are less of a concern, but once we start addressing how groups work together, the technology will only take us so far. Constructive relationships are needed in order to keep us moving forward and the tools now at our disposal can obviously be a significant component to facilitating some of that interaction, but the soft/interpersonal skills that are required to maintain those relationships are getting far too little attention compared to the hard skills. I'm just curious as to whether or not this is implied in your title and needs not be explicit...? Too often it seems in recent discourse on social media and collaborative tools, we focus on the technology and forget about the importance of interpersonal development. The tools are a facilitator but we, as individuals, still have to do the work, make the connections, maintain the relationships.
David Eaves
· 7 months ago
Tariq - this is exactly my point. I think the soft skills (mediation, negotiating, listening) have received less attention than necessary. So I'm in part interested in how we encourage or foster those skills through the tools we use (rather than just calling something that connects people "collaborative" - I've seen too many flame wars on IRC and email to believe they are inherently collaborative) as well as how we can "nudge" people to behave better while using these mediums.
All Comments
one question: do hierarchies that are built on merit and performance (like mozilla's meritocratic nature) foster collaboration early on so all can participate? i may be missing your point, but was trying to think about how mozilla fosters success in its community. it seems that a new developer will find a level of credibility and acceptance at mozilla by showing what problem he or she solved with code and how it was done, but not necessarily through collaboration. so, a new developer has to present all that he or she does before actually reaching out for help...just to get in the door...
does building a community on meritocracy create a barrier that is an initially very high transaction cost? and, because there is that initial transaction cost, does it persist throughout the culture to try to climb the ranks of the meritocracy?
I think you do hit on a point here. That the initial barrier to entry is high, and there is a risk that, for some, credibility only comes by presenting completed solutions and that reaching out before then means you will struggle to get help or acceptance within the community. This could be a barrier hindering community growth and participation. Moreover, this could impact the culture and structure of the meritocracy by self-selecting community members who value work that is completed and who themselves tend to share their work when it is in a finished form.
The ability to functionally decompose the software architecture is determined largely by the kind of system you're building - as open source grows to fill every niche the kind of software that can be built in the "tiny widgets loosely joined" method shrinks. Which is why those monolithic open source projects that already exist are so impressive - Linux kernel, WINE, the W3C corpus, PHP, Java, etc.
Mozilla's BeSpin (which looks alot like a Web 2.0 version of Sun's Enterprise IDE) is a step in the right direction - code editing becomes an online collaborative (rather than offline cooperative) process. It's Google Docs for Code.
The next step is to do a wiki-IDE...
Have a look at one of my favourite old books written by Eric Jantsch called "The self-organizing Universe" It is a superb treatise from the philosophy of science genre looking for meta-theories of change. Written while he was at Berkeley in the 1970's it has not lost its hold on me as a way of understanding how we respond to change from neutron splitting to social organization.
I might be able to find you a copy if you do not have access to one at UBC or SFU.
Warm regards,
Sharon
I'm seeing a bit of a gap here, and hoping you can clarify or help me out. The title of the post is "why collaborative skills matter", but there was little mention of what those actual skills are, other than a need to negotiate and/or focusing on the reduction of transaction costs. Collaborative skills are one of many components that make up soft-skills or interpersonal skills - a crucial element of successful collaborative/cooperative engagement. On something as specific as coding for firefox or open source software, that require little person-to-person interaction, I suppose interpersonal skills are less of a concern, but once we start addressing how groups work together, the technology will only take us so far. Constructive relationships are needed in order to keep us moving forward and the tools now at our disposal can obviously be a significant component to facilitating some of that interaction, but the soft/interpersonal skills that are required to maintain those relationships are getting far too little attention compared to the hard skills. I'm just curious as to whether or not this is implied in your title and needs not be explicit...? Too often it seems in recent discourse on social media and collaborative tools, we focus on the technology and forget about the importance of interpersonal development. The tools are a facilitator but we, as individuals, still have to do the work, make the connections, maintain the relationships.