Changes

The speaker for the talk “” , “Community Building and the Architecture of Participation,” was Greg De Koenigsberg. He is a community designer architect for Red Hat. Though he has been with the community since 2001, he is as enthusiastic as a newcomer in the community. Only one word can describe this kind of speech and energy of the speaker and that word is “wOw”. Here is his website http://people.redhat.com/gdk/. This might interest you.

Everybody in the open source world knows the answer that open source products are betterthan other products. However, that is only a few of them knows the reason why they are herebehind it. But Gerg Greg provided some numbers, facts and solid arguments to show how open source products are better than copyright products. In the graph, growth of a certain an open source community is shown. It The graph says that number of features increases as number of contributors increases. And inversely, number of bugs decreases as number of contributors increases. It This scenario is the same thing scenario for copyright products. However, after copyright products have some limitations. After some time copyright products cannot afford more contributors to the project. So, the product growth remains steady, not increasing. On the other side, nobody can limit the number of contributors in open source community. So the Hence, product growth is never going to stop. More and more features are going to be added by more and more contributorsin open source world. Even the speed velocity of growth will increaseis increasing. PlusIn addition, more and more bugs are going to be fixedvoluntarily. In short, limited amount of money will limit the number of contributors in the copyright product. While In contrast, in the open source product products, people don’t have to worry about money so much because so many people are just volunteering.

“Release early, release often” is another motto 'mantra' which helps growth of the community growth. It means that a product should be up-to-dateddate. Let’s say As an example; Microsoft takes around 3-4 years of time between each releases of Microsoft office. And everybody knows the The differences between Office 2003 and Office 2007. The difference is are so huge many that it is they are sometimes hard to adopt. But However, if they would have released often with little bit of changes, users might adopt it more easily. On the other hand, anyone can get the latest trunk version of Mozilla Firefox from the trunk and use it. In this case, it is much easier to adopt changes because small changes do not affect users that much.

Another important topic he raised was devoted to He also discussed the importance of contributorsin the community. He strongly believes that the community is zero nothing without contributors. That is the reason why he emphasised on making contributors happy and satisfied. If contributors are satisfied, community growth can be unbelievable. And if contributors are not satisfied, the community starts breaking. In short, “contributors are God” to him.

Another quote he was promoting emphasised on was, “trust the community.” Anyone who want to be a part of the community he/she should have faith in the community and community members. Newcomers should believe in the seniors and try to walk on seniors’ path to success. Similarly, seniors should not misguide newcomers in the community. In short, It is a both side responsibility for of newcomers and seniorsto trust the community and make community running. If everybody trusts everybody in the community, the community will become a great place for success everybody - contributors and growthusers.