The Open Source Community Readings

The readings for week 2 were pretty interesting , both based around the same concept, the open source community, but both presented in different and interesting ways. Both of their concepts seemed to be tried to inspire the same thing, the motivate people into jumping into the open source community, because they David said, you are not going to be invited in.

The most powerful idea they both seemed to be presenting was that, trying to wait and build up your skills before jumping into the open source community is a flawed approach, though one that is pretty much the standard approach used elsewhere. They tried to emphasize that its OK to just jump in and absorb whats going on around you, its OK to try and fail. By simply taking part in any small part of the community, you are helping build the community, and even if what your attempting to do fails, you will learn enough not to make the same mistakes the next time and you will grow more integrated into the community.

One thing that struck me about what Mike Beltzner said was that one of the most useful skills you will learn in the open source community is who you should listen to, and who you can safely ignore, and that you can probably safely ignore 80% of the those who are communicating in the community. This spurred a few conflicting thoughts in my head, while I would naturally completely agree with such a statement, that most talk is simply noise, it makes me wonder if that means in the open source community, if you are just entering the scene, does that mean your goal is to try and fight your way into the 20% margin of people worth listening to? Or is it OK to simply go ignored until you have done something worth listening to, though this sorta conflicts with the idea that you should just jump in and try....

One last thought I had came from David's speech about the festivals. By simply going to the festival, does that really make you part of the community? Or are you simply there to utilize the fruits of the community's efforts? What I am trying to differentiate is the use of the community vs participating in the community. A festival doesn't come together the day of, it requires much planning and preparation, and by simply going to the festival doesn't make you a part of it. How do you make the transition from festival goer to actually participating in it? While I believe there is value in going and seeing and understanding the activities, the transition into actually becoming a part of it hasn't been well illustrated here...