Baking community into companies

Jordi Mas has written a thoughtful post on the value of community in companies, and particularly open source ones. Community, as Jordi points out, is not exclusive to open source – Microsoft, for example, has a vibrant and active developer community.

But open source, because of its licensing, affords greater opportunities for communities to coalesce. Opportunity doesn’t necessarily translate into actuality, as I’ve found in the open source companies with which I’ve been affiliated. Community is hard work, and requires a very different way of thinking about a product.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I think the right license is crucial to reaping the right community. Why? Because a community-friendly license firewalls the community somewhat from a company, so that they need not trust the company as much as the code. Javier, CEO of Hyperic, gets at this in a post of his own on community:

All of these things are what we had in mind when we released HQ under the GPL. In fact, it’s the driving force behind any open source software – a strong community will make or break a project. Some people like to brag about downloads as the penultimate metric of success, but it says nothing of how people are using it and interested in it. An active community will show the true heartbeat of a projects success.

I couldn’t agree more.

So, how to tell when the community is truly driving your company? Jordi poses some questions that can help you determine just how community-centric you are:

Product

• Is the product roadmap pubically available?

• Is there any way for your community to prioritize the roadmap?

• Are requests for new functionality handled in a open and transparent way?

• Is your product well documented?

• Are you providing infrastructures like wikis to make it happen?

• Are your employees the only ones representing the product in conferences?

Development

• Do developers from outside your company have privileges to make changes on the code base based on their knowledge? (meritocracy) Or are they second class citizens?

• Are the architectural decisions shared with the community?

• Is your development carried in open mailing lists and chat channels?

• Does your development team live in the community? Or completely apart?

Engineering

• Is there a public database of all know bugs? Or you still keep an internal database?

• Do people document their changes using ChangeLogs and similar ways?

• Are software releases done regularly to encourage participation?

I started trying to justify myself about halfway through the first question. It’s hard to open up in the way Jordi’s questions imply one must to gain community, but I think his questions lead to true community-building.

Most companies (proprietary or open source) have customer advisory councils that allow key customers to give feedback on product roadmap, quality of support, etc. We just had ours last week in NYC and it was very helpful.

But Jordi is talking about broader participation here. He’s talking about truly turning a company inside out, so that the project becomes as important (or perhaps more so) than the company behind it. This is a very difficult leap of faith, but I think it’s the right one.