Web 2.0 and Open Source Communities

By Dawn Foster (15 posts) on August 25, 2006 at 12:16 am

I havebeen spending quite a bit of time over the past few months thinkingabout the similarities and differences between web 2.0 communitiesand open source communities as my technology area of interest /expertise shifts toward web 2.0. I discussed this topic briefly inthe OSCONArt of Community session, and I hope to spend more time exploringit this weekend at FooCamp.

Hereis a preview of my thinking. This is a complex topic, and Iencourage people to leave comments with suggestions, additionalideas, or to point out any errors in my logic.

Communitycollaboration and collective intelligence are key reasons for thesuccess of open source software. Open source focuses on cooperationand a desire to avoid duplication of effort as opposed to proprietarysoftware's focus on secrecy to maintain competitive advantage. Thisis manifested in several different ways:

People build on the ideas of others through mailing list discussion and reuse of code or ideas.

The source code is made available publicly for anyone to examine, modify, and distribute.
Communities conduct peer review, especially for contributions from newer community members, as a collaborative form of quality control and a mechanism for providing feedback.

Communitycollaboration and collective intelligence have also contributed tothe success of web 2.0 communities. In the Whatis Web 2.0 essay, Tim O'Reilly says that a key lesson of the web2.0 era is that "users add value". Many web 2.0 sites arearchitected for participation to take advantage of user createdcontent and build communities that improve as more people use them.Starting with this focus on collective intelligence and user-createdcontent, a number of similarities between open source and web 2.0communities emerge:

People build on the ideas of others through blogging and contributing content to sites like Wikipedia
The discussions and content are made publicly available for anyone to examine and contribute to the discussion through features like comments (blogs, Digg, etc.) and reviews (Amazon.com). Wiki discussion and history pages are another way to make the conversation behind the content available for anyone to view.
Many communities have peer review functionality built into the site. Digg, Newsvine, and Netscape have mechanisms to review and vote for user submitted content to promote the best news stories to the front page. Sites like Digg, Flickr and others also have ways to flag content as inappropriate, which provides a self-policing mechanism where the community members monitor the behavior of other users.
Eric Raymond's Linus's Law ("Given enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow") was originally written with open source software in mind, but it can be applied to web 2.0 communities. Regardless of the nature of the error from obvious to obscure, if enough people look at a site, someone will notice the problem, and point it out or correct it

Inaddition to these similarities, there are also some differences:

OSS community members have historically been highly technical, self-sufficient, are comfortable with minimal tools (text editors, command line, html, coding). While some web 2.0 community members have technical backgrounds, we see more members who may be new to online communities, less technical, and expect tools to make it easy to contribute (blogging tools for example).
OSS communities can be more difficult enter for a new user because typically more time is spent upfront understanding the community history and source code before a new member can be truly productive. Web 2.0 communities have a much lower barrier to entry, since anyone with an opinion can start commenting on Digg; anyone can create a MySpace profile to share with their friends; or any amateur photographer can upload, tag, and share photos on Flickr.

Thesimilarities and differences lead to a number of areas where web 2.0and open source can learn from each other:

Open source communities can learn new ways to bring people into the community and lower the barrier to entry. Using web 2.0 tools that are intuitive to more people may help bring in more marketing people and other less technical community members. SpreadFirefox is a great example of how to engage with the less technical user community.
Web 2.0 communities can learn from the long history of lessons learned in open source communities around etiquette, defined processes, dealing with poisonous people / trolls, and more.

I amsure there are more similarities and differences between web 2.0 andopen source communities, which would lead to additional ways that thetwo can learn from each other. I look forward to having thisdiscussion in the comments on this blog and with other people at FooCamp this weekend.

Categories: Open Source

Comments (3)

By Trends in Web 2.0 by Dawn M. Foster on August 31st, 2006 at 11:43 pm
Last weekend I had the opportunity to
attend Foo
Camp (Friends Of O'Reilly), an amazing event hosted...

By nithyashree1@hotmail.com on September 19th, 2006 at 3:05 am
Really a great idea. This will be helpful for the students like us who are really interested in creating a new ideas so ur open source can give a blue print.Using which we can create our own desired thing.
Good Idea
Keep continuing..................
with regards
Nithya

By Prashanth B.R on November 27th, 2006 at 9:39 am
Good introductions towards web2.0 and open source.
But i feel that web 2.0 and open source are actually complementing each other. They are part of the same trend "High active user Participation".

Requesting you provide some insights about how open source communites can contribute and provide value add towards Web2.0 software.

Intel® Software Network

Web 2.0 and Open Source Communities

By Dawn Foster (15 posts) on August 25, 2006 at 12:16 am

Categories: Open Source

Comments (3)

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