Thursday 27 September 2007

Are we a community project?

I have been listening to the latest 'Open Season' on 'the Register' and they are discussing Yahoos purchase of Zimbra, but they keep coming back to the marketing and the type of open source projects that are around. One of the terms that I keep picking up on is 'community project'. At the moment I am not too sure what a community project is. I have done a quick search on google and there is no defined definition. But what exactly is a community project?

Well I understand a community project to be a project that benefits a particular group of people by fulfilling a specific task that is common to all. From this I see a CoP developing around the project and I think this is the way that I hope WebPA is moving.

The other concept that I picked up on that may help define a 'community project' is the user base. From my understanding a community project within the open source world seems to measured by the number of users that the project has. For me this maybe a negative view of projects. For example WebPA will never have a user base say the size of Moodle, but that should not mean that we are not a successful community project.

As the open source movement continues to develop at the rapid speed that it does I think the original value of open source may be lost.

1 comment:

Ross Gardler said...

As the open source movement continues to develop at the rapid speed that it does I think the original value of open source may be lost.

This is absolutely true. The term open source has been hijacked as a marketing term. this has been a concern of many in the open source world for some time. It has led to an increased use of the term open development. This emphasises the ability of community members to participate in the project in some sensible way (bug reports, feature requests, patches, etc.).

Of course, this brins us back to your question of "what is community?" For open development the community is anyone with an interest in the project. That includes users, potential users, developers, documentors, journalists, commercial spin offs and whoever else may have a need to interact with the project.

For more info on open development see Is Open Source Being Watered Down? from the Apache Software FOundations marekting team.