Activity begets activity
October 26th, 2007 by HenThis is a favourite phrase of mine nowadays - I used it so often at SourceLabs that it was practically on my t-shirt. “Activity begets activity”. It’s a very simple idea, and hardly original. If you want something to happen, if you want community to build, then start doing something.
It’s inertia right? The classic “I’m just one person, why me?”. Communities have inertia. One person starts doing something, then it gets easier for others to. One other joins in, it gets even easier. We’ve all seen the movie in which someone steps up, picks up a stone, walks over and plants it down. They walk back, pick up another, and plant it down next to the first. Others join in and the pile of stone turns into a wall. Classic Hollywood junk.
As with most lies, it’s based on truth. That first person in fact has to build 25% of the first wall before someone else steps up and helps. I suspect part of it is based on success and people’s different levels of optimism and pessimism. When you start your activity, it begins the process of turning pessimists into optimists, seeding hope. So it’s not magic, it takes work, but ACTIVITY BEGETS ACTIVITY.
Another lie. A summarization of the truth. Activity does not beget activity - community awareness of activity begets activity. That means you have to make sure that people are seeing you being active. Many of the Open Source projects out there are designed to maximize on community awareness of activity - though it’s often for defensive purposes to make sure that people aren’t able to slip bad things in.
I’ve recently got myself moving on Commons Lang issues again after a couple of months lying low and it surprises me that the number of issue reports is going up. Minor bugs, improvement ideas, but it’s all activity, and the really cool thing, the end of the night “I love you” moment, is that the activity you beget begets back. You maintain your energy because of the activity. Another way to look at this case is that the activity of patches being applied imparts hope on the community that patches are being applied and more are posted. Commons CLI 2.0 is an additional point to that; a quote from the user list today says “It seems to me that the CLI 2 committers are not currently active. So it is hard to work on it. Is there anything we can do except for waiting?”. Hope is missing.
Reflecting on all this - I realize this is one of those ‘this is why!’ statements for being part of a community. Whether or not the the input from others is a lot or a little, that activity energizes our own efforts and makes our job easier. Makes the work fun.