Open Source Commentary from Navica's CEO, Bernard Golden

In This Issue

• The Future of Community

• Navica News

Last month's newsletter focused on the practicalities of community -- how to figure out if the community associated with a particular open source product is a good one to join.

This month's newsletter, inspired by observations of some communities located outside of the open source world, considers how future communities will operate -- even more crucially, what expectations will community members and organizers bring to communities in the future?

The Future of Community

While community is always described as one of the key tenets of open source software, there is no widely agreed-upon definition of what actually comprises a community. Some people regard community as all people who use or contribute to a product. Others regard community as limited to those who contribute artifacts to a product -- code, bug reports, documentation, tutorials. Still others circumscribe community very narrowly, limiting it to those individuals who contribute code -- programmers are the participants while everyone else is an observer.

Furthermore, most discussions of community share an unspoken assumptionf that community is fixed through time– that the assumptions, conditions, interactions, and expectations of community members will continue as they currently are and remain unchanged in the future. These working assumptions and practices usually are referred to as “governance”. While each community has its own “flavor,” almost all people who discuss open source community seem to believe that, overall, it will continue in the future pretty much as it is today. I must confess that I too shared this easy-going assumption.

However, I was recently taught a lesson about community – by a member of my own family, no less – that caused me to rethink my assumptions about how communities will work in the future. In particular, I've been forced to reconsider how open source users will interact with developers and each other in the future – because future community members will come to the communities they participate in with a life-long experience of community interactions and, crucially, a set of expectations that will raise the bar for what they will accept as a minimal level of interaction with and influence upon the creators of the products they use.

As I said, I learned this lesson from a member of my family; specifically, from my son Sebastian, age 5. We recently attended the O'Reilly Media Maker Faire, a two-day extravaganza of personal creativity, ranging from the simple (how to cut cardboard to make cool creations like castles) to the complex (how to create your own computer chips) to the just plain fun (how to create air-powered rockets using water as a reactive mass that shoot up 300 feet in the air; this was a huge favorite of the Golden family and the creator put on a workshop that enabled our boys to help build one – v. cool).

While at the Maker Faire, I had a chance to speak to the Lego Mindstorms folks who got great press from Wired Magazine recently about how they included Mindstorms users in the design process for the next release of the product. Shortly after the Faire, Lego announced that they would open source the firmware for their internal chips to enable users to further extend the capabilities of the product.

This, in itself, is a testament to the growing power of community. By including passionate users of the product in the design process, Mindstorm raises the probability that they will deliver a more satisfying product to their current and future user base. Furthermore, by making their firmware available under an open source license, they will be able to draw upon the creative energies of a far larger engineering staff than they could ever employ. Certainly, these initiatives demonstrate the increasing application of open source principles to new domains.

However, my eyes were further opened to the potential of community by a educational toy we purchased for our sons. Called Snap Circuits, it is designed to help children learn about electricity and how to create electronic circuits from various components. The kits come with a manual describing a number of experiments to be constructed; each experiment teaches a specific aspect of electricity. All well and good – and an excellent learning experience.

Despite the excellence of the toy, it must be said that its quality is not matched by the other efforts of the manufacturer, Elenco. As can be seen from their website, Elenco devotes only rudimentary effort to supporting Snap Circuits beyond the physical toy itself. It must be said that their website looks like a first project in an elementary school website design class. Clearly, Elenco focuses primarily on selling to its channels rather than attempting to increase end user satisfaction by providing additional information available to SnapCircuit users.

However, notwithstanding the lack of communication effort by Elenco, they have created a simple Snap Circuits site to share information with Snap Circuit users as well as enable them to collaborate with one another. The site has two features that are worth commenting on. The first is a forums page, where users can ask and answer questions; someone from Elenco also participates as well. These forums offer a way for users to sort out any problems they have with the product; given that it is distributed through a retail channel that provides no support, these forums enable puzzled users to achieve success with the product and thereby raise their satisfaction with it.

The second feature is even more interesting, and shows real creativity on the part of Elenco. They have provided a tool for end users to document circuits they have designed themselves as well as the ability to upload the new design so that others may use it as well. Sebastian has downloaded a number of these designs and built them; he is also documenting a few of the new circuits he designed with an eye toward uploading and sharing them. Naturally, he is quite proud of his ability to use the design tool and to share his inventions, which has made him much more pleased with the product, not to mention much more likely to purchase (well, actually, have his parents purchase!) additional Snap Circuit pieces.

This ability for children to proudly share their creations and use other children's designs illustrates the key aspect of Elenco's nascent community-building efforts. By offering an opportunity for young children to get more pleasure from the product and, simultaneously, allowing them to increase their self-esteem by being able to share their designs, Elenco is increasing the likely financial returns from Snap Circuit. Enabling community sharing – and by helping community members feel better about themselves through demonstrating their intelligence and creativity – will pay dividends to Elenco. And Elenco's efforts show that the power of community can be cultivated in a very young user base. In other words, it's not necessary to wait for well-educated adults to begin gaining network effects through community-building.

The implications of this type of community building bear commenting upon. Unlike today's adults who are learning about community and its characteristics, consumers like Sebastian will grow up with an expectation that tremendous amounts of information above and beyond official documentation will be available from the vendor – not to mention that users will be able to communicate among themselves without any vendor intervention (or even awareness, in many cases). Sebastian and his peers will never know the frustration of being limited to what the vendor chooses to make available. That will transform the traditional relationship between vendor and customer.

Vendors of the future will have to be much more aware of their community and its satisfaction. There will be no room to assume consumers will just take whatever the company feels like dishing out. An isolated example of customer dissatisfaction won't result in one unhappy person – it will probably affect hundreds if not thousands of customers and potential customers.

And what do you think the expectations of community members will be? They will naturally -- instinctively -- assume that their product and service providers will consult with them, pay rapt attention to their opinions and desires, satisfy their exacting requirements. With anything else, companies can expect their user base to decamp in a crowd.

There's an open source lesson in all this as well. Proprietary software users are all too accustomed to being treated like sheep, dumbly herded by their software providers. Once they get a whiff of insight, influence, and power by experiencing the community of open source, they throw off their sheepish demeanor. And soon after, they stop baaing and start barking. They begin to see equality and influence as a right, not a privilege.

If you're an open source vendor, you must keep this in mind. I've heard a number of discussions by open source vendors that enthuse about the community as offering an opportunity to reduce support and QA costs; in this view, open source is kind of the ultimate outsourcing arrangement. But once someone realizes they're doing part of your job, the next step is they expect you to pay attention to their needs and desires. Don't expect that community is a one-way street with all the traffic and power flowing your way.

There's another lesson in this regarding open source. As I noted at the beginning of this piece, there are a variety of definitions of what community means. While many people have an inclusive definition that incorporates end users as well as active contributors, others have an exclusive definition that includes engineers but bars end users from being members of the community; this latter definition has the scent of elitism about it. Most critically, this restricted definition is incompatible with the communities of the future -- it is fundamentally out of touch with the direction that community is going.

Whether vendor-based or ubermensch programmer-based, narrowly characterized communities will suffer as they attempt to impose their vision on what they believe is a passive user base. Simply put, the "passive" members of the community will rebel -- and they're more important than the supposed central community members.

An example of the cross-cut power of community occurred this January. After paying over $600 million for MySpace, NewsCorp began to behave in a manner entirely consistent with the old rules of top-down, provider-centric control: It started to censor user postings and block access to rival sites – perfectly appropriate behavior for the old media world NewsCorp grew up in. However, after a firestorm of protest and, even worse, user threats of migration to another site, NewsCorp backed down and dropped its enforcement mechanisms. Welcome to the new world of user-controlled community, where participation trumps old media.

Open source handily lends itself to this kind of user insurrection. If the community is dissatisfied with the product provider, it can fork the code and start anew, leaving the provider ruling a deserted kingdom. The recent Mambo debacle illustrates this community power vividly.

The convergence of a new user base conditioned from the get-go that the community must set the agenda for the vendor rather than the reverse, easier communication between more-easily located fellow users, and low-cost business models that renounce financing of key product elements like support and QA result in a vastly different kind of vendor/user relationship. It's a great time to be a consumer, but a terrible time to be an imperious provider.

Navica News

I am now regularly blogging for CIO Magazine with my own blog: "The Open Source." I am aiming for a mix of commentary on significant open source developments along with a perspective on why open source is important to IT management along with recommendations about how to take advantage of it. You can read it here.

You can hear me speak at these upcoming events:

May 30, 3:00 p.m.: IKT Norge -- ICT Norwegian delegation touring Silicon Valley. Presentation topic: "Open Source Trends: Local and Global"

June 16, 9:00 a.m.: Burton Group Catalyst Conference. Presentation topic: "Open Source ROI: The Real Story"