On open source communities health
So, this is the first post on my brand new blog. What about it?
Well, I decided to write (and share, of course) all my thoughts about what the Open Source phenomenon is giving to our life (and to my life in particular…). I’m actually focused on study community building and managemement, determining how much a community is in health and I think try to evaluate that from the development process is not trivial.
I’ve found some interesting idea in Ohloh and kept a promise to myself to study it in more depth, even if - at the first sight - they seem too much approximatives. After all there are some Apache projects (Agora) focused on extracting data about community efforts from mailing lists, why so much interest?
I think over the open source more important is the open process: everyone could release its own software as open source just applying it a license. But if there is not a “real” community under the project….well, it’s simply dead. And in the vast sea of OS what that can makes the difference is the community: how much people are involved, how well they interact, how well conflicts are resolved and decisions are taken. Providing automatic tools to gather all these data could given an invaluable help in conducting some analisys on communities.