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→Free and Open Source Strategy as Practice: Participant Perspectives - Mekki MacAulay
After the site building extravaganza I’ve decided to attend “Free and Open Source Strategy as Practice: Participant Perspectives” by Mekki MacAulay who is a PhD Candidate for strategic management at Schulich School of Business. I was drawn into it because I thought I would be learning about how to about open source strategies and practices and would be useful for my DPS909 course. How stupid was I for not digesting the rest of the topic. “Participant Perspectives”.
Although the presentation was not something I was expecting, just like the previous talk I attended, I found the talk very interesting. So instead of talking about the practices that new programmers should use, Mekki decided to go deep into strategies and practices that are being used. I personally wouldn’t even be able to split the practices like he was able to but after listening to his talk, it started to make sense why research like his were important. Mekki started by identifying the type of users in the open source community and questioned the room whether the core developers or the end users would feel the burden of wrong practices the most. Although people from the room blurted out core developers, he told us that it is the people who are further away from the core developers has more opinions about practices because they are hit the most. In the beginning I just made a guess that it would be core developers, but after listening to his presentation, I can understand why it is not. Mekki’s main focus on his study is how practices affect the outcome of an open source community. He understands that communities can split, make have unclear directions or does not make progress at times and wants to study why these effects occur. First, Mekki classified enabling and disabling practices. Mekki further broke them down to recursive and adaptive practices. Mekki interviewed various people involved in the open source community. He did not identify who the interviewees were but they ranged from project leader to passive users. The interviewees gave examples of practices and Mekki was able to categorize the practices and make a table to show that recursive practice tends to be disabling while adaptive practice tends to be enabling. He also compared recursive practice to cathedral and adaptive practice to bazaar, which I found interesting because I have read the story less than couple months ago and knew about the topic to agree with his presentation. I love the fact that he seemed happy to present his topic. He was prepared to answer questions by the audience and did not after listening to his talk, it started to make sense why research like his were important.
==Conclusion==