The Goldfish Chronicles

There are times when I think people don’t grok the benevolent dictator bit. They don’t understand what benevolent means (in this content) - it doesn’t mean that the dictator is a nice jolly fellow who doesn’t impose rules on the community; it’s deeper than that. It means that the leader does not claim ownership of the project - they create an environment in which the members of the community feel a strong ownership.

The simple root of community involvement is that people will not get involved if they do not believe that they own their involvement. I don’t mean legal ownership, thouigh that is important to many people, I just mean the belief that they have ownership. They have a say. The benevolence of a dictator is in maintaining a society of freedom, otherwise volunteers will not put in an ounce of work.

There are many proviso’s to this.  One is that you can still have a caste system in which a set of the users aspire to be members of the free society. Open Source product companies are very good examples of a caste system, with a set of the users aspiring to be developers and having to work hard to get there (as it usually means becoming an employee), but Apache and other such volunteer groups have the same concepts, just a more easily overcome set of walls.

Another is that if you are not giving legal ownership to the community, you are going to have to work harder on making sure your community members feel they have a say. The Sun LDAP stuff is an example of how that can go wrong. The belief in ownership is more than just the various IP laws.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 13th, 2008 at 4:41 pm and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.