Dec 31, 2007 Posted by Herko on Dec 31, 2007 in Personal notes | 0 comments

The case against organised leadership in open source communities

Every­thing you say tho seems to me to be a point for my per­sonal case *against* organ­ised lead­er­ship within the XOOPS com­mu­nity. Espe­cially since cre­at­ing a hier­ar­chy and orga­ni­za­tion is it’s pri­mary *goal* and not a tool to accom­plish the actual goal: to develop a world-class prod­uct, and pro­vide great com­mu­nity sup­port, all in the spirit of open source software.

Hun­dreds of posts have been made, dozens of new sites have appeared, many peo­ple have put their names on the shitlist (aka the teams), and nobody feels responsible.

IMO (an edu­cated and expe­ri­enced opin­ion), the true mean­ing of ‘Pow­ered by you’ (a slo­gan I cre­ated bythe­way) is that *every­one* is respon­si­ble for their con­tri­bu­tions and actions. That means: if it is a suc­cess, you get the credit and kudos, if it fails, you get the blame. No super­vi­sion from an offi­cial team with a report­ing struc­ture and deci­sion mak­ing hier­ar­chy. The com­mu­nity can func­tion per­fectly fine with­out it. If it needs some­thing like that, it will cre­ate one. Tem­porar­ily, for a spe­cific purpose.

The main rea­son I left the project was that every­one pointed at me for every­thing every­one else wasn’t doing. ‘Solve my prob­lems, that’s what the com­mu­nity wants!’ Because I made myself respon­si­ble, I –and only I– was respon­si­ble for *every­thing* that went wrong. So if some­one else fialed to keep their end of a bar­gain (skalpa deliv­er­ing, catz­wolf deliv­er­ing, preda­tor deliv­er­ing, hervet being nice, marco think­ing like an adult, that sort of thing), I was to blame. And when I claimed cred­its for stuff that went well, I was an ego­tis­ti­cal maniac and a dic­ta­tor to boot. (among a LOT of other things)

My point here is, only by mak­ing EVERYONE respon­si­ble for the suc­cess and fail­ure of the com­mu­nity, do we have a truly open and col­lab­o­ra­tive com­mu­nity. Hence the case against organ­ised lead­er­ship in the community.

Then there’s the devel­op­ment project, that has its own tools and mech­a­nisms com­mon to open source code devel­op­ment to deal with options, choices and such. No need to rein­vent the wheel there.

As for the Foun­da­tion, that’s the only ‘offi­cial’ part: it rep­re­sents every­thing the com­mu­nity does and the project cre­ates. With­out bias or polit­i­cal pur­pose. It makes sure the com­mu­nity can do its thing (servers, etc.), and com­mu­ni­cates as the Voice of XOOPS. What­ev­ery that may be. It sells teh prod­uct to the masses, what­ever the prod­uct is. So it doesn’t lead, it facil­i­tates and represents.

That’s just my opinion…

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