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I’ve seen people go from saying that they don't have the technical skill to be a primary maintainer of a project that is very technical, just by giving them the permission and that blessing to say, "You're one of the team, you're equals with us and you have the responsibility to help foster this community and this proj... |
\[\\00:35:44.27\] It's really surprising how that works in practice when you give them the responsibility. It's the responsibility that does it; when you give people responsibility over a project, then it creates in them something that makes them step up to the plate, and they are not just somebody from the outside tin... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I really like this outlook of, "Well, you don't know if they are casual or not." Do you ever experience a tension between people that are already working on the project a lot and the kinds of policies that are gonna help them out and favor them, versus what’s gonna be more applicable to people that f... |
**Rod Vagg:** I think the tension comes mostly in terms of culture, and that's something that you do have to be very tuned into. How do you treat people coming in from the outside? It is helpful the fact that everyone who is part of that core group has already gone through that process, so usually they are tuned into t... |
So most of the time, it’s actually really positive, but you do have to be careful that culture does not start to turn inward too much and start to become snobbish to people with different opinions. Because the fact about open source projects is that if they don't evolve with the people that use them, then people will s... |
I don't even need to give examples here, because this is the history of open source, and people move on as well, and people show up; those new people often bring new ideas and new preferences, and if you don't allow a project to start to accept some of those new things, then you can become just as stale as a classic op... |
I've seen this in a couple of projects where it’s a small group, and you end up with a bit of an echo chamber about how something should be, and other people coming from outside with new ideas/alternative views and they have a hard time really getting into that echo chamber. |
I think that’s still the same problem that open source has had for a long time. It can be solved, but it's a matter of actually being attuned to it and watching for it, and making sure that you keep on reminding each other that "Hey, new people value this as much as we do." |
In fact, a lot of the time new people may value it more than we do because we might be moving onto new things, and we might be hanging around here because it’s a great community, but in terms of use of the project, other people out there may be using it more than we are and may actually place more value in the project,... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** You said something interesting, which is that it's about culture; when everybody has gone through the process, you naturally have a culture that is really welcoming and open to newcomers if they started on that kind of long tail of contributions... But what about projects that have an established cul... |
\[39:59\] So I was wondering if you could speak to some of the standardized arguments against liberal contribution policies, and what your response is and what other people's response should be if they are trying to move a project in a new direction or establish a newer culture. |
**Rod Vagg:** I think that these standard arguments are actually very familiar even outside of open source and software. My wife is a teacher, and during the rise of Wikipedia I got to hear all of the arguments that came from typically librarians, actually, but also educators that were used to having walled gardens aro... |
It's simply a fear of openness, it's a fear of the masses and the crowds. Some of it is legitimate, because it's a fear of chaos, and chaos is scary, for good reasons. But in practice, things are not chaotic; it's actually this wisdom of the crowds, this collective process where people get together and they get to coll... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I'll give you one of these very specific things that we had to deal with, because I really want to know what your response is to this very simple one, because I hear it over and over again in other projects; they have a project with a bunch of open pull requests, and what they're really falling under... |
**Rod Vagg:** Well, for a start, how good a problem is that to have, that you have people lining up to contribute to your project? That's a great problem to have, so get over yourself. But the best answer to that I think is if you look in practice at how this actually works. When you have a project that has those kinds... |
That's an obvious place where a lot of people can help in open source, and they know they can help because they're doing it already often in their own projects. They can go and actually help with that interface with the community. |
So very often I'll have a project that I might be the only person doing it, and I say -- it might be something trivial, but I have this contribution policy where if you show up with something non-trivial, then I'll give you ownership of it; somebody might show up and I give them ownership... Almost immediately they’ll ... |
\[44:22\] In terms of getting a flood of people contributing, as I said, I think that's a great problem for open source project to have, and that was not something to be afraid of with Node. That was something we wanted to embrace, because that meant that Node was healthy and if we couldn't unblock that, then it was go... |
But there is a fear there of the outsider coming in with different ideas to what you already have. As somebody who starts an open source project particularly, you have these ideas in your head about what this thing could be, where it's going, and very often you'll hold to those ideas pretty tightly. It’s a rare open so... |
If you are unable to let go of that internalized vision, or if you are unable to actually communicate that in a way that people are actually able to get on board with, then it can be really scary, because you’re saying, "These other people that don’t share my inner monologue about this project, these other people are g... |
That was one of the things I think we faced with Node, and it’s probably gonna be a challenge for a lot of existing projects. They have this idea, that this project is on a path towards this point in time and certain people, particularly people that are just interested in technical problem solving, the people who are t... |
I think that’s the problem we faced with Node and I can see that same problem with some other projects that are considering, but not quite at the stage of accepting this kind of model. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Good stuff. We're gonna take a short break and then when we get back we'll talk about reconciling liberal contribution with the BDFL's model of the past and what things might look like in the future. |
**Break:** \[47:05\] |
**Nadia Eghbal:** We're back with Rod Vagg and we are talking about liberal contribution agreements. I would like to hear about at what point do you think a project is "ready to take on" a liberal contribution policy? A lot of projects now start with a BDFL model and then they might transition later, but that’s how a l... |
**Rod Vagg:** My ideas here are very much formed by my own involvement in community groups outside of technology, and watching community groups that are held too tightly by a core group really fail to get traction and thrive. And this idea that you can run a group for your own personal interest -- that's a pretty raw w... |
If you have a community, then that community needs to exist for itself. It needs to be self-referential, it needs to be self-governing, it needs to be self-owning. And when you're running a community group and you’re not letting the people inside it have that sense of ownership or the actual ownership, then you're in f... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** So earlier you were talking about how one of the big fears is that other people coming in are going to change the vision of the project, and what you were just talking about there kind of backs it up. There's gonna be this tension between the personal interest that I have and the shared interest of o... |
**Rod Vagg:** Right, okay. So I guess that back us to the previous section about the objections, and one of the big things is scope creep. And that’s acute for us in the Node area, because we have this idea of small core, and a lot of us, particularly that have been around Node for a while, have this very much internal... |
We appreciate the core of Node being small, so that was a particular problem for the Node core project, but we also apply that all across the ecosystem. We like having our modules small, we like having the scopes small, so that we can have lots of these modules pieced together and not have these modules balloon out int... |
So there is a fear of scope creep there. If I open up to people coming in from the outside, then they are gonna add all this crazy stuff because they want this thing to do more than it really should do. In practice, that comes down to culture again, and also this whole consensus seeking process. |
\[51:44\] You can actually see how this works by looking at governments, in general. The more people you add to a committee, the more people you add to a government, the harder it is to make decisions, and so that process of - it's like an intentional gridlock that actually is built into this liberal contribution proce... |
We see this all the time, particularly with Node core now, because we have people showing up all the time wanting to add features because they think... They have this idea that something belongs in core because they are bringing their preconceptions about what a standard library should be from other languages, be it Py... |
Yeah, I guess that's a roundabout way of saying a couple of things there, which is that the model itself is not very well suited to big revolutionary changes; it's much more suitable to evolutionary changes, which is actually in the interest of users, because software projects that do revolutionary changes that might c... |
That happens all the time with open source and that’s the nature of revolutionary change. You have users out there that value the thing as it is and if you are not evolving it in contact with those users, then you are gonna be in trouble. So the process itself really lends itself much more to evolutionary change, and a... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I wonder if that makes the argument then that... I mean, if you want to say arguably the most "innovative stage" of a project might be earlier on when everything is still really new, and you're trying to lay the foundation, find your voice, find the culture and the kind of angle you wanna take, it mak... |
**Rod Vagg:** I don't think so. So BDFL, for a start, I really don't like the idea of BDFL. To me this idea that you can take full ownership and be dictatorial on a project that is valued by other people often very deeply, I find it really repulsive. And so just in general I just hate that model, and often what happens... |
We still have that in Node, because many of us that work on Node Core, we do that as a job. We spend a lot of time in there, rather than being users of the project. So that’s where the value of constantly having this intake of people who value the project enough that they are willing to put in time and effort to contri... |
And it might matter to you simply because you have some history with it, or you've become emotionally attached to it, but if it doesn’t matter to you as a user of the project, then you are in a bit of trouble. |
\[57:47\] So back to the original question, which is how early should you start this thing... I don’t have a great answer for that, because I’ve seen it work in different ways; mostly, new projects don’t have a lot of buzz anyway. When you start a new project, you might pick up a few interested people in your ideas, bu... |
I'm not sure that it makes sense to say, "This thing should be BDFL until it's ready", because until it's ready, you're probably not gonna have enough users that want to jump into it anyway, and if you have this idea of what is ready, if that’s obvious, then contributors are probably gonna be onboard with that anyway. ... |
It might make sense for you to just hold something as closed sourced while you get it ready to be open sourced, so you're not always throwing out projects that are not gonna be finished, and maybe you wanna set something up that's obvious where it’s going. That might be an important thing to do, but I don't buy the arg... |
We're in a very distinct phase with Node, which is we've gone past the phase of defining what this beast is. That happened - I think it happened all the way up to I think Node 0.10. That was very much an evolving process of trying to figure out what the boundaries of this application, this platform were. |
We've gone through that process; we have a very clear understanding of that now, so we're very much in the phase of minor evolutionary incremental changes to improve things for the life of users. We're filing off the rough edges, and we are basically in this maintenance mode, but it's still extremely active maintenance... |
That's a very distinct phase for Node, but I think Node still could have been developed early on from being much more open than it was, and it may have even gotten to a better place, but I don’t know. I doubt it would have gotten to a worse place than it is now by being more open. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Sounds like even if effectively there aren't that many people contributing early on, that’s different from codifying the idea of BDFL, does that make sense? It sounds like you're suggesting that liberal contribution works from the very beginning and just realistically you're not gonna have as many peo... |
**Rod Vagg:** That's just right, and that brings up an important point, which I haven’t touched on at all which is the importance of leadership. It's nice to have this idea that you’re gonna have people show up, you're gonna have this emergent property of leadership, it's just gonna emerge out of the mass of people doi... |
\[01:02:01.17\] That’s what happens early on in a project - you've either got one person or a few people who are passionate enough about making this thing work, that they are willing to put in that much time to get it there; rarely do you have a lot of people doing that. Usually, there is only a small group or only one... |
As the project evolves you need somebody or some people to serve in that role of facilitating the community, and that comes down to the fact that not everyone is a leader and we ought to be fine with that, that not everyone wants to be a leader and not everyone has those natural skills to be a leader, and when you acce... |
The other way that it can manifest is simply in the respect that people get over time, and that’s how leadership can evolve in these projects. It evolves in open source in general; you build up this capital of respect by your contributions and by what you know and what people know that you know, and you see that in com... |
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