The Shared Itch
November 13th, 2007 by HenA corollary to “activity begets activity” is “it’s all about the itch”. This is a fairly common bit of diatribe for OSSites to use. Let’s go a step further and talk about the importance of the shared itch in a community.
We, individually, get started in Open Source because of an itch. We contribute to a project because something irritates us enough to fix it or complain about it, then we dig a bit further and that itch becomes a hobby, a vocation, a bloodsucking vampire that drains our souls. Erm. Pretend I didn’t say that last one ;).
That’s all about the individual - the selfish instinct. Communities don’t have itches, rather they have a shared itch. It’s the overlapping of the various individual itches at first, but as the community grows the need increases for that shared itch to gain character, to anthropomorphize, to pick up its scythe and start pulling people onto the same page.
I suspect the shared itch is an important factor in the long term survival of a project. It’s about how the people involved have a common ground and a shared understanding in the general direction of the product’s requirements. I think that it usually manifests itself as we answer “What does X do?”. We record the shared itch in the description of the project’s output, and focus little on where it really lives in the input to the process.
November 13th, 2007 at 6:57 pm
I didn’t really get the last couple of sentances…”I think that it usually manifests itself as we answer “What does X do?”. We record the shared itch in the description of the project’s output, and focus little on where it really lives in the input to the process.”