[Foundation-l] Community, collaboration, and cognitive biases

[Rob Lanphier]

On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 6:28 PM, Aryeh Gregor
<Simetrical+wikilist at gmail.com<Simetrical%2Bwikilist at gmail.com>
> wrote:

> It's not specific to Wikimedia, it's practically universal in
> open-source development.  To get it to happen, you need pushing from
> the top: formally stating it as part of people's job duties (so they
> don't feel they have to do "real work" instead), and forcing them to
> engage by only giving them public media to discuss things in with
> their co-workers.


Hi Aryeh,

First, let me state from the outset: I think it's great to work out in the
open, and I find that the people I'm working with at WMF are at the leading
edge of community collaboration on a number of fronts (compared to peers at
typical tech companies or even non-profits).  Feel Free to ping me on IRC,
email about anything I'm working on right now (that goes for others as
well).  Note also: in the spirit of this conversation, I didn't run this by
anyone at WMF, and I'm still using my @wikimedia.org address anyway (and I'm
only a contractor).  We'll see if I get in any hot water for that ;-)  Just
so you know, part of my job here (besides work on Pending Changes) is to
work on development process at WMF, so this thread is pretty relevant to my
day job here.

As you know, any time you want to compel someone to do something, there's
always the carrot and the stick.  One thing I don't like about the way
you've phrased that is that is that you seem to be advocating the stick.  Am
I reading that right?

One undertone that I've witnessed everywhere is that people in open source
communities that have a clear organizational "owner" is that there is a very
uneven distribution of people who want a peer-to-peer relationship versus a
customer-vendor relationship.  This makes it really difficult to work out in
the public, because some people seem to prefer the trappings of a
peer-to-peer relationship (let me in on your early thinking, publish your
roadmaps, work in the fishbowl), where others prefer the trappings of the
customer-vendor relationship (the customer is always right, the customer is
the boss).  Some will even go so far as to want a customer-to-peer
relationship, which is clearly not sustainable.  To be really clear here,
most of my impressions on this topic come from my previous work experience
(been doing the corporate open source thing for a while), and only in a
limited way with this community, but I've seen hints that the
WMF<=>community relationship has some of the same traits.