This document outlines antipatterns that can harm open source communities. It discusses issues related to governance, communication, culture/environment, merit, decision making, leadership, balancing forces, and other concerns. Specific antipatterns mentioned include having too much or too little governance, keeping community operations private, being restrictive about approved communication channels, failing to actively pass on culture to newcomers, prioritizing rules over guidelines, making criteria for success vague, creating an unfriendly environment, believing merit can be absolutely measured, ignoring leadership needs, being partisan, making community building someone's job rather than developers, and centralizing by giving people turf. The document aims to help open source communities avoid these pitfalls.

1. Open Source Community
Antipatterns
Ted Leung
Sun Microsystems
1

2. What’s a good community?
• Level playing field
• Innovation happens elsewhere
• Diverse/Sustainable
• Hit by a bus number
• That human sense of community

3. Categories
• Governance
• Communication
• Culture/Environment
• Merit
• Decision Making
• Leadership
• Balancing Forces
• Other
3

4. Governance
4 http://www.flickr.com/photos/twleung/2669753459/

5. Wrongly Sized Governance
• Too little is bad
• But too much is also bad
5

6. Don’t document
• how the governance operates
6

7. Communications
7 http://www.flickr.com/photos/balakov/853643975/

8. Keep things private
• This is the root of all evil when it comes to building communities
8

9. Be restrictive about approved
media
• It’s 2008... do you know what a blog is?
• The innovator’s dilemma in governance and media
9

10. Culture
10 http://www.flickr.com/photos/twleung/2637756567/

11. Don’t actively pass the culture
on
• Fail to inculcate culture / way of doing things
• leave it undocumented
• Don’t actively mentor newcomers
• Say “how” but not “why”
• The Starfish and the Spider:
• The unstoppable power of leaderless organizations
• Ori Brafman and Rod. A Beckstrom
11

12. Rules not guidelines
• Insist on rules without principles
• Prefer rules and not principled guidelines
12

13. Be privilege oriented
• The opposite is to be responsibility oriented
• The bad result is that people seek privileges as opposed to responsibility
13

14. Build a talk-o-cracy
not a do-ocracy
• Doing is more important than talking
• Talker-not-doer’s are a DOS against the community
14

15. Make criteria arbitrary or
vague
• for success, advancement, inclusion
• capricious, secret or otherwise arbitrary
15

16. Keep it professional
• That’s a bunch of hooey
• Talk like a human not a droid or lawyer
16

17. Environment
17 http://www.flickr.com/photos/brighton/2154396202/

18. Make an environment
unfriendly to
• Under-represented groups
• Women
• Non-Caucasion people
• Non-English speakers
18

19. Don’t be respectful
• This should be an explicitly stated norm
19

20. Geographical Colocation
• is an antipattern. Period.
20

21. Merit
21 http://www.flickr.com/photos/netsui/1448181277/

22. Believe that merit
• is absolute and absolutely measurable
• can be defined along a single or small number of dimensions
22

23. Don’t recognize Merit
• or do it slowly

24. Decision Making
24 http://www.flickr.com/photos/denverjeffrey/2196784972/

25. Use lots of procedures
• Don’t explain how decisions get made
• Have different decision making styles/procedures for different contexts
25

26. Leadership
26
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lumaxart/2137729430/

27. Ignore the need for leadership
• “I don’t think that word means what you think it means”
27

28. Try to “manage”
• Managing != leading
28

29. Balance Forces
29 http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikeautry1/644553134/

30. Be Partisan
• Make sure that one or more parties obtain the majority of the benefit /
benefit disproportionately
33
30

31. Other
31 http://www.flickr.com/photos/p-s-e/2272958336/

32. Make community building
someone’s job
• Even better, make sure that somebody is not a developer
32

33. Hire outsiders who have never
worked together
• It’s all about trust
• Trust can’t happen without alignment
• Alignment is hard to achieve than we think

34. Fail to apply open source
tools to the governance itself
• Accountability for governance/foundation tasks
34

35. Centralize:
Give people turf
• The Starfish and the Spider
• The trouble starts when there are resources to manage/allocate
• Property rights (too much ownership)
35

36. Questions?
Ted.Leung@Sun.com