Re: [Chicken-users] inventory of community skills

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Peter Keller wrote:
> I haven't contributed in a long time and your message has made me
> realize why.
>
> While I'm happy to write large and complex pieces of code that solve
> interesting problems for open source projects, I basically don't want/have
> time to maintain them. It really is something like a fear of an obligation
> of maintenance which is keeping me from contributing more. It probably
> stems from the stress of having to fix tons of difficult bugs in the
> software I am employed to work on every day (distributed computing
> has its own class of mind shattering bugs too), and when I get home,
> the last thing I want to do is customer support--again.

Indeed.  I've been doing it without a paycheck for over a year.  It's 
not an equitable balancing of the wants and needs of an open source 
community.  What we all *want*, is for our software to be a profitable 
activity.  If you bother with Chicken when you get home after work, you 
want it to do something for you.  Not do a whole pile of things for it.

An ideal, theoretical open source business model, would spread the 
impacts of development evenly over the entire community.  So that nobody 
has much work to do.  Then people can rationalize, "Ok, if I contribute 
a few evenings a month to the open source labor, we'll all have this 
great Chicken system," that for the most part enables everyone to get 
Real And Fun Things Done [TM].

This is an entirely theoretical proposition.  A lot of Von Neumann game 
theory would suggest that it's impossible.  This specific game is called 
"The Stag Hunt."  Although the community would benefit as a whole if 
everyone went out to hunt a stag, and everyone took equal burdens and 
risk in so doing, it actually pays to slack off and stay home.  You 
don't get hurt, and the stag hunters will bring home the meat anyways.  
Someone playing the game "rationally," rather than cooperatively, will 
stay home.

I think the way most open source communities are actually organized, is 
a few key people are ideologically driven.  Something bugs them very 
much about software, so they hack and hack and hack and hack to try to 
fix it.  Their software products are somewhat beneficial to others, so 
communities arise around them.  People glom onto a project if they think 
they can solve their own ideological issues without much additional work 
over what others have already done.  This is why I joined the Chicken 
project originally, for instance.  I didn't anticipate that I'd be 
banging on things for so long.  I have strong ideology about "builds not 
sucking," having been burned by so many of them.

> So the upshot of this email is that some people just want to write the
> code that will solve the problem initially, but not participate in its
> evolution.  You should have room in your organization markup for such
> a person.
>
>   

It can be marked as such in a database.  But what would ever stimulate 
anyone to finish anything and make it usable?  I think there are answers 
for that, potentially.

One is inherent in various people's psychology.  In Belbin managerial 
theory there's one type known as the "Completer Finisher."  That person 
is very driven to complete things.  Can't remember if they're any good 
at starting them; probably not.  Similarly, there's a type called the 
"Plant" that is great at chucking out new things, but gets bored with 
them fairly quickly.  So, combining people into teams, where different 
people take on different psychological roles, can accomplish a lot more 
than they could individually.  Individually, they all have their 
sticking points, and predictably get stuck.

Another is the "Tom Sawyer" principle I hearkened to earlier.  I have 
some ideas about how that might get going.  I have an idea for an 
animated mascot called "Project CyberChicken."  But I will hold off on 
any real discussion of that, until I see what kind of workloads I can 
actually take on in the next few weeks.  It's possible that with 
signature gathering season upon me, I simply can't do anything right 
now, let alone lead a project.  So no use getting people all hot and 
bothered about how cool the CyberChicken could be.

A third is to find a way to amplify ideology.  That's implicit in an 
inventory of community skills.  The presumption is that 5 OpenGL guys 
are more powerful than 1 OpenGL guy.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every