TOSW 0.2.2 The Open Source Way Creating and nurturing communities of contributors Edition 1

1.4. Essential terminology or ‘Read this even if you think you know what it means’

1.4.1. Community

When people talk about community, they may be talking about very different things:

• People who use something
• People who like something
• People who advocate for a technology
• People who enable others to use something
• People who contribute to improve something
• … and so on.

When we talk about community in the The Open Source Way, we mean the community of contributors who are a superset to all other communities. The ones who, by getting things done, make it possible for many, many more to get much, much more done.

This is the group of people who form intentionally and spontaneously around something important to them. It includes the people who use or benefit from the project, those who participate and share the project to wider audiences, and the contributors who are essential to growth and survival.

Contributors are the oxygen. Without it, the animal chokes and dies.

1.4.2. Tactics

This is derived from military terminology. The common example is a group of soldiers who work with a squad leader to take and secure a hill.

Tactics are the ideas, plans, methods, and means used to accomplish a goal. That is, tactics are the maneuvers used to achieve an objective that is set by strategy.

In Fedora, the strict yet clever packaging guidelines are a strong-arm tactic that enforces the Fedora strategy of good packaging of only free and open source software.

1.4.3. Strategy

Strategy focuses on everything from which hill to secure, to deciding which miltary campaigns to engage in.

A term from military science, strategy is the focus of the command group. Strategy focuses on setting goals and which groups can obtain the goals.

Once the “who, what, where, when, and why” is decided, tactics takes over as the “how”.

The Fedora strategy of creating and supporting only FLOSS is derived from the culture of the community combined with a pragmatic view of the legal and business landscape.

1.4.4. Planets and blogs

A blog is a mix of personal and project writing that comes from a participant or contributor.

The idea of a blog planet is to show the width and depth of personalities in a community, and what they are doing.

It intentionally allows for personal expression. In other words, the content is not all community specific. It is sometimes wildly off topic.

The Fedora Planet is a good example, with blogs aggregated from willing contributors. People add themselves to the planet, and it is a mix of languages, topics, skill levels, and project interest. All aspects of the Fedora Project are covered there on a daily basis, with a wide variety of contributors from Packaging, Art and Design, Marketing, upstream development, and so on.

1.4.5. Leaderless organizations

A leaderless organization is decentralized, meaning it does not rely upon a central authority for leadership, strategy, or tactics. Being decentralized makes it easier to heal, faster to respond and innovate, and more able to grow in scale.

An example of a large leaderless organization is the Internet. Not just the set of agreements that makes the structure work, but all the way down to the wire protocols that route around damage in the network, such as when a backhoe slices through a fiber link between two ISPs.

In projects, Wikipedia is a decentralized organization, while the Encyclopaedia Brittanica is a classic centralized organization.