Pinky: What are we going to do tomorrow night, Brain?
Brain: The same thing we do everynight, Pinky.
Pinky: What’s that?
Brain: …I have no idea.
I think a lot of us Open Source people are taking part in a community hoping that the whole
will be greater, not less than the sum of its parts. That assumption is also the basis for
democracy, although the real effect is questionable in some cases. We’re lucky, since we don’t have
to discuss that. Wait, we have. Meritocracy
has been the government system in KDE for quite some time, but recently we saw a shift towards democracy. While I’m pretty convinced that
democracy can suck badly, and especially in merit-based communities, there are certainly some
positive effects. In my opinion these have a lot to do with the meritocracy not having been explicit
enough, and are as such very Open Sourcish. Open Sourcish since explicit sharing of skills is
certainly not one of the strengths of most Open Source communities. Tacit knowledge is what we’re
good at and we need to find ways to make that knowledge more easily available to others
if we want to open up for new
contributors. And we can since we might just
have solved one of our biggest problems that has been slowing down the development process:
scalability of the group decision-making process. Enter our Technical Working Group.
I am really happy to see that decision-making actually is happening again. For a major new
release, someone has to do the job of trying to get the heads into the same direction, and that is
no fun. Coding is fun. Dealing with politics is not. What I’m missing sometimes is some sort of
shared vision. Sure, that doesn’t fit into a naturally grown community like most Open Source
projects are, but at least it’s a good idea to remember that making decisions and communicating them
is an essential topping for the pizza that’s called world domination. Bottom line: We went far
beyond what’s supposed to work “together”, and we’ve certainly proven the mythical man month wrong in more than one
aspect. But if we want to keep doing so, guidance is certainly needed. And that’s what I’d like the
Technical Working Group to give to KDE. Guidance, and a clear direction.
In Patterns of Governance in Open Source by Steve Weber (Published in Open Sources 2.0 – The continuing
evolution), the author proposes to design the governance institutions in ways that facilitate
information paths, rather than the other way round. Sounds like a no-brainer, sure. Now try to think
about the complex information structure in most Open Source projects. That’s where I’m getting
dizzy. Nevertheless we did quite a good job, since our decision-making-dudes are respected,
long-time contributors and as such, they’re also information hubs within the community.
Well done, KDE.