A few days ago, I read an article “5 Ingredients for Building Community”, which talked about what is needed to build a designer community. The author summarized these into 5 English words starting with P: Purpose, People, Practice, Place, and Progress. Thinking carefully, these 5 requirements can almost cover all communities, of course, the open source community is still applicable, but due to the particularity of the open source community, there are different changes and meanings.
(Image from: opensource.com)
I think China’s open source community lacks many basic capabilities, so I put these quality requirements together with the 5 P-initial English words from the original article, and the result is as follows:
Purpose
A community must undoubtedly have a clear and concise goal that can be directly explained in one sentence. Here are some examples of famous communities, taking only open source communities as an example:
- GNOME Foundation: To create a computing platform for use by the general public that is composed entirely of free software.
- Fedora Linux: Freedom. Friends. Features. First.
- OpenCV: was designed for computational efficiency and with a strong focus on real-time applications.
- Blender: We want to build a free and open source complete 3D creation pipeline for artists and small teams.
These examples are all from abroad, are there any in China? Of course, some open source products or open source communities have very clear goals, but their expressions are more verbose and cannot directly reach people’s hearts. Why have clear goals? The purpose is to use these goals to guide community activities and to find people who are willing to contribute to them.
People
The open source community is different from other communities, and even different from many technical communities. The key here is that the people in the open source community are a specific type of people - hackers! Every time I have to say that hackers are different from so-called “crackers”. Hackers are committed to researching computers and making computers serve humanity, while “crackers” are criminal acts that aim to damage others’ digital property and steal others’ privacy and property. The acts of “crackers” are despised by the hacker community.
So what qualities do hackers have? This can be answered from the book “Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution” (by Steven Levy), which summarizes a set of hacker ethics. The ethical principles emphasize “sharing, openness, decentralization, and any cost to manipulate machines”, which is in line with the spiritual core of PC culture and Internet culture:
- Access to computers (and anything that might help you understand our world) should be unlimited
- Everyone has the right to try!
- All information should be freely available.
- Don’t blindly believe in authority - promote decentralization.
- The standard for judging hackers should be their technology, not those indicators without practical use, such as degree, age, race or position.
- You can create art and beauty on the computer.
- Computer technology can make your life better.
So people who uphold such hacker ethics can often have a high status in the open source community and be respected by the community. Therefore, building an open source community is to attract and find such excellent hacker talents in various occasions. It is precisely because of these people that practices that are in line with the spirit of the open source community can be carried out.
Practice
With people in the community, what do everyone do? In fact, everyone understands the big principles, but many open source communities in China now feel like they are “dead” because they have not had practical activities for a long time, no gatherings, no code, no output, and no interpersonal communication. They can be said to be completely nominal.
Open source communities do different things according to different purposes. Those aimed at developing open source projects will mainly focus on development, such as writing code, bug maintenance, documentation, art design, and product promotion; while communities aimed at promoting technology will focus on the technology itself, such as example development, localization/internationalization, promotion activities, and marketing. These activities have their own characteristics and requirements. Different practical activities highlight the importance of team collaboration because of cooperation, and at the same time, because of cross-domain and interdisciplinary integration, they build a platform for full communication and cooperation for people with different academic backgrounds.
From this, a conclusion can be deduced: the ultimate goal of all these practical activities is one thing - communication. For example, COSCUP (Conference for Open Source Coders, Users and Promoters) in Taiwan has a clear goal: 40% speeches, 60% making friends. This concise and clear goal directly states the fundamental goal of the open source community, which is the output caused by interpersonal communication. Open source is a huge change in development methods brought about by community communication and cooperation. Therefore, the main practice of the open source community is to promote interpersonal communication and promote decentralized cooperation.
Personality (Autonomy)
Unlike “5 Ingredients for Building Community”, here it’s not Places, but Personality. Because open source development is more online activities, offline activities are relatively few, and there are not too many requirements. For the purpose of communication, any resources can be used, but personality is often ignored by everyone.
Many open source communities in China have a bad idea that open source communities must be “affiliated” with some organization, or large companies, and never thought that open source communities should be independent. In fact, I don’t want to talk too much about personality here, but more about autonomy. Open source communities must have their own style and independent operation capabilities, and cannot rely on the strength of others. Because the more you rely on others, the more you let others bear the obligations that you should bear, and at the same time, you also transfer the rights you can enjoy to others. Therefore, open source communities must understand this truth. Although the saying goes “It’s good to enjoy the cool under the big tree”, but without the “big tree” that covers you, can this community still exist independently? Can it continue to operate independently? Some of the communities mentioned above later became nominal because they lacked the ability to be independent and eventually buried themselves.
Not only the community, but every member of the community should also have autonomous ability. Whether you can independently contribute to open source projects and find your position and value in the community depends entirely on the degree of autonomy. g0v.tw (Zero Government) in Taiwan has a famous saying “Don’t say ‘Why is there no one’, you are that ‘no one’”, which directly answers the question “Why is no one doing XXX?”. For those who are interested in participating in the open source community, never ask “Why is no one doing XXX?” or “Why is no one doing XXX?” Because when you find that improvement is needed, it is where you need to contribute. Don’t wait for others to do it while you enjoy the results, but should strive to contribute to the problems you find, which may be where your value is reflected.
Progress
For community leaders, it is very important to provide community members with space for personal growth, but even more important is the community’s ability to progress. If a community only has all kinds of eating and drinking, or the open source products developed cannot keep up with the times, are quickly replaced, and do not show the community’s ability to progress, such a community will eventually fall apart.
An open source community in Beijing that promotes a certain open source project became famous after an event in 2008, and also understood the principle that open source communities need more communication, so they used the remaining sponsorship fees from the event to generously entertain community members. This was a good thing, but for a long time later, everyone participated in community activities to get free food and drinks. Many years later, this community gradually became nominal and could not carry out good activities, which is very pity. Looking back at this process, it is not because everyone was getting free food and drinks, but because the community made too little effort in promoting technology, and there were no contributions in the later period, unable to attract and retain new members.
Let me give another example I participated in. In 2012, several like-minded people decided to establish an open source hardware community with the goal of building a completely open source quadcopter Open-Drone. The community was quite large, with many active members, and even appeared in newspapers such as the Global Times (English version) and Beijing Today (English version). But soon, as old members left Beijing or were busy with their own affairs, the community finally became quiet last year. Looking back now, everyone’s goal was For Fun, but there was little progress in technology, and the product prototype was never developed. Although many additional products appeared in the end, the community could not develop and retain new members.
In the final analysis, the progress of the community is accompanied by the continuous progress and dedication of each community member. The two examples above clearly show that community members must have the motivation to work hard and progress, and at the same time, the community must give these members space for development, encourage and promote new members to find their own value, and quickly integrate into the existing community structure.
Simply put, a community with clear goals will attract suitable people to do suitable things together, and reflect value in communication and cooperation. And all of this depends on the community’s and everyone’s autonomous ability, enterprising spirit, and room for growth.
I hope that the Purpose, People, Practice, Personality, and Progress that the open source community needs most as mentioned in this article can help those who are confused in the operation of the open source community. A short article is not enough to solve all problems, but I still hope to point out a direction.
Reprinted with permission: Developer Relations »
