Mike Milinkovich
Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation

Creating Open Source Communities and Platforms

Slides in PPT and PDF

based on a talk at Adobe dev conference
how do you create a community around a platform?

great technology
architecture of participation
being hijacked by a fanatical community

why is it number 1?
-- not the features, because it's a great platform
-- invites participation (on many levels)

best thing you can do for an open source project? write a great bug report

(talked about Eclipse...)
if you use Java, keep up with OSGi
IDE is the most complicated rich user desktop app
-- [ed. tech users can handle that much, most can't]

switch to EPL was hell
-- emailed everyone, no matter how small the contribution

Borland and BEA are moving to Eclipse/RCP

Architecture of Participation
-- low barriers for newcomers
-- proposals for new ideas, community decides
-- Eclipse got it right... close to 1000 plugins
-- caveat emptor: some plugins suck!
-- you need the Cathedral to enable the Bazaar
-- add-ons are first class citizens: plugins use the same frameworks as the IDE (and core team)
   -- empowering for individuals

Eclipse is very laissez-faire (same with Apache)
-- failure proves the community standards are high
-- seeds for a broad ecosystem
-- open source plugins compete with commercial plugins
   -- commercial has to be extra good

Unique to Eclipse
-- open source community that wants to have commercial adoption
   -- hit their delivery dates: predictability fosters adoption
   -- ship ten different open source projects on the same day
-- quality matters and enables the ecosystem

Eclipse uses it's membership dues to pay for massive bandwidth costs
The community doesn't use BitTorrent as much as they say they will
-- [ed. why not integrate BitTorrent transparently into Eclipse update?]

"Brand Hijack" is a book (Alex Wipperfurth)
-- "win by letting go", key message
-- let the community define what your brand is
-- another book to read: "the culting of brands", really cynical
-- created the foundation so that all companies are on the same playing field
-- counter ie. manager that wants to know where all of your time goes
-- embracing uncertainty

Anatomy of a Community
-- role-based: users, platform committers, plug-in developers (leverage arch. of participation)
-- need all three of these
-- users will want to extend the platform in ways you can never imagine
-- tech-based: rich client, java devs, modeling, embedded (v. big), report devs, php devs
-- Metcalfs Law: value of network is equal to the square of the nodes in the network
   -- applies to communities as well
   -- value of community: number of links between members, not the number of people

Is it fanatical?
-- newsgroup, mailing list, bugzilla activities, page views
-- lots of communication between participants: monitor this

How to get there?
-- first: get rid of the marketers
-- second: admit we're all marketers
   -- regular people have the ability to be a marketer [ed. Internet enabled this?]
-- blog: Creating Passionate Users
-- it's all about community conversation
-- can't fool people any more with mass market techniques (ie. Scoble)
-- can't create an open source community without code
-- embrace "others" as leaders: community leaders, bloggers (ie. Ed Burnette)
-- be transparent, say thank you

How not to do it?
-- no one reads press releases, they do not create a conversation

The next generation of platforms do not have to be open source but it sure helps
-- ie. Microsoft has lost the ability to ship code [ed. not so sure about that]