One of the stalwarts of Subversion, Ben Collins-Sussman (a Googler and former CollabNetizen), remarks

Not that this should shock anybody, but in case you didn’t know, now you do. The overlap between Apache and Subversion communities has always been huge since day one — with essentially identical cultures. We’ve talked about doing this for years. It means we can finally dissolve the ‘Subversion corporation’ and let ASF handle all our finances and legal needs.

via blog.red-bean.com

Observers may not realize just how true this is. This announcement is a great thing for Subversion, for ASF, for CollabNet, and all other companies who depend on Subversion for their work and products, because it means that the supporting details are in good hands, and the contributors can get back to their contributions. But in another sense, it's about as "un" an event as it well could be.

One anecdote from the press conference yesterday really drove that home for me. John Mark Walker, of OStatic, and Paul Krill, of Infoworld, asked how this change will affect Subversion developers and users. Everyone around the table leaned forward to answer, but the winner was the current President of the Apache Software Foundation and a major Subversion committer, Justin Erenkrantz, whose response began "In the Subversion community, we've always operated in the Apache way." This was echoed and reinforced by Sander Striker, past President of the ASF and another major Subversion committer, and Greg Stein, several-time past Chairman of the ASF and one of the most active Subversion committers of the moment.

So there you have it: if Presidents and Chairmen of the ASF think of themselves first as members of the Subversion community, how much change could we really be talking about?

As community managers go about each day with a multitude of tasks from providing product and site support, managing various programs and projects, creating slide shows and webinars, to answering reams of emails, we don't always stop to see the whole picture of what's involved in creating and sustaining community. Yet, CollabNet has over 10 years of experience now doing just that, and each of the community managers have at last that or more years working with online communities.

We've had a good deal of success in creating and maintaining both open source communities and Enterprise communities, so it seemed only right that we share what has worked for us with other community managers. The question then was how do we go about pulling all that information into one place, and break down our experience in an easy-to-understand format?

Community in Box services was conceived to help software development teams establish and nurture the collaborative culture characterized by the most successful open source communities. As a part of that service, we wanted to offer a free Community Cookbook, full of our expertise and wisdom, outside community managers could use, and so companies could see what is involved in creating and maintaining Enterprise and Open Source communities.

So, back in June '09, five CollabNet community managers and several executives met on the east coast for two full days to cook up, brainstorm, all that was involved with Enterprise and Open Source community management. Carey O'Brien had the wonderful foresight to bring big wall size sheets of paper, and over the course of the two days we each contributed our experience to specific categories and areas of community management.

Of course, sheets of paper can't be shared with the public, so we wrestled that data into a TeamForge project. The Community Management Project contains the Enterprise Community Cookbook and the Open Source Community Cookbook. You need to register and log in to view the pages.

Some of the community components we covered in the cookbooks are represented in the image below:

There are, of course, many topics within each of these components, including why a community is so necessary to have.

This has been an exciting project to work on for all of us in the Enterprise and in Open Source. To see the differences in how we handle and support each of these communities is interesting and important.

While all businesses would like large communities to flock to their platforms, software, and products, it's essential to have made the right preparations for community support and management, and to understand the nature of those communities so they can flourish. Then everyone wins in the end.

Enjoy the Community Management Project!

This weekend I attended the Community Leadership Summit in San Jose. Before it even started, I had an interesting discussion with Jack Repenning and a man who was investigating various community models for a homeschooling organization he's working for. As we talked about the needs of the parents of homeschoolers, I realized how much they had in common with open source community members:

• They are joiners and have need of connecting with other parents like themselves
• They do not want an overt governing body controlling the way the community interacts
• They have need of shared resources and discussions
• They want to stay away from institutionalized or corporate rules and pressures, and instead want the community members to have roles emerge organically

There are likely some similarities I'm missing here, but I realized in this discussion that these types of communities can benefit from the open source community model. In an open source community, it's important that creativity is encouraged and unbound, that community members are treated equally, and that any roles assigned are appropriate and emerge out of needs rather that what an official overhead dictates. This type of community is self-regulating for the most part, if not entirely.

The parents of homeschoolers, and many groups like them, are rejecting conventional methods of education, but that does not mean they don't have a driving need for support, communal togetherness, or collaboration.They do join groups, parenting, educational, as well as many others, but they want to avoid the school "feel."

Additionally, I can see how a project model and platform would work for homeschoolers and their parents. Homeschooling often involves collaboration similar to software development. Needless to say the Subversion and TeamForge platform would be ideal so that children could work together on various projects, keeping all versions of a project and adding to it, while parents could make use of collaborating on resources, documentation, and discussion forums.

Both the open source community model and the CollabNet platform and tools would work well for the homeschooling crowd, and no doubt many other non-developer types.

I'm noticing more communities wiggling out from "the man" and opting for an open environment in which community drives and guides itself. Everyone seems to be tiring of corporate or institutional pressure and dictates. I think we'll be seeing the open source community model becoming more the norm than not over the next few years. And it will be interesting and fun to see what kind of creativity emerges from these communities of free thinkers.

 

Join me at EclipseCon March 23-26, in Santa Clara. I'll be on a panel, Controlled Chaos - Version control in the Twenty-first Century, and at the associated BOF, both on Tuesday.

And also, catch me at the SDForum Global Open Source Colloquium, Monday, March 23, in San Francisco.