The case against organised leadership in open source communities

HerkoDuring the meanwhile Leave a Comment

Everything you say tho seems to me to be a point for my personal case *against* organised leadership within the XOOPS community. Especially since creating a hierarchy and organization is it’s primary *goal* and not a tool to accomplish the actual goal: to develop a world-class product, and provide great community support, all in the spirit of open source software.

Hundreds of posts have been made, dozens of new sites have appeared, many people have put their names on the shitlist (aka the teams), and nobody feels responsible.

IMO (an educated and experienced opinion), the true meaning of ‘Powered by you’ (a slogan I created bytheway) is that *everyone* is responsible for their contributions and actions. That means: if it is a success, you get the credit and kudos, if it fails, you get the blame. No supervision from an official team with a reporting structure and decision making hierarchy. The community can function perfectly fine without it. If it needs something like that, it will create one. Temporarily, for a specific purpose.

The main reason I left the project was that everyone pointed at me for everything everyone else wasn’t doing. ‘Solve my problems, that’s what the community wants!’ Because I made myself responsible, I -and only I- was responsible for *everything* that went wrong. So if someone else fialed to keep their end of a bargain (skalpa delivering, catzwolf delivering, predator delivering, hervet being nice, marco thinking like an adult, that sort of thing), I was to blame. And when I claimed credits for stuff that went well, I was an egotistical maniac and a dictator to boot. (among a LOT of other things)

My point here is, only by making EVERYONE responsible for the success and failure of the community, do we have a truly open and collaborative community. Hence the case against organised leadership in the community.

Then there’s the development project, that has its own tools and mechanisms common to open source code development to deal with options, choices and such. No need to reinvent the wheel there.

As for the Foundation, that’s the only ‘official’ part: it represents everything the community does and the project creates. Without bias or political purpose. It makes sure the community can do its thing (servers, etc.), and communicates as the Voice of XOOPS. Whatevery that may be. It sells teh product to the masses, whatever the product is. So it doesn’t lead, it facilitates and represents.

That’s just my opinion…

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