Institutional Web Management Workshop 2004:
Being Open Source

Materials

Session Notes

This workshop concentrated on the notion of community that is often associated with open source software. What sort of community (or communities) is it? How does one participate in it? And more important how do you generate and sustain a community around your own open source project? It's not easy, and no two projects need follow the same path.

Open Source Fundamentals

The workshop began with Randy Metcalfe giving an overview of some open source fundamentals, many of which were covered in Sebastian Rahtz' plenary talk Beyond Free Beer.

• the licence: whether it's the GPL or BSD or anything in between, if it doesn't ship with an OSI certified open source licence, then it isn't open source software
• freedom: there is no sense in pretending that open source software isn't tied to the concept of freedom promoted by the Free Software Foundation. Remember: it's about Free Speech, not Free Beer.
• community: developers and users have a very close relationship in the open source world. In many cases they are one and same person. There is undoubtedly a sense of being part of something when using open source software, but what exactly?

Workshop participants contributed freely to discussion of these initial fundamentals before moving on to some of the specifics of community building.

Building Communities

In response to a series of provoking questions participants volunteered a range of characteristics that may individually or collectively be required for building a community around an open source project. Key, here, was the role of the project leader. The level of commitment, responsiveness, vision and personableness shown by the leader(s) of the project could have tremendous impact upon a project's success. This is perhaps even more important than the communicative tools deployed to support community interaction (yes, even wikis!).

Questions considered in this section of the workshop:

• What are the essential criteria for initial community development?
• How can an open source community be sustained over time?
• If your software development is project-funded, how can you ensure that the community will continue to develop and sustain it after the project funding ceases?
• Which is more important a) community building events or b) clear constitutions that make explicit the community role within the project?
• How would you prevent forking of your project within your community?

Model Communities

Sebastian then picked up the thread and explored a range of open source communities each with a different take on developing and sustaining their community.

We considered:

• Apache
• Exim
• MySQL
• Bodington
• OpenOffice
• Text Encoding Initiative
• Urchin
• TeX

Final Thoughts

All thanks to the participants in the workshop for their useful input and suggestions. Please feel free to add your own thoughts and corrections to the above account. Or email OSS Watch at the address <info@oss-watch.ac.uk>

Randy Metcalfe and Sebastian Rahtz