{"id":203,"date":"2017-04-12T21:08:26","date_gmt":"2017-04-12T21:08:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/osen.jm4thefuture.com\/?p=203"},"modified":"2017-04-12T21:08:26","modified_gmt":"2017-04-12T21:08:26","slug":"ask-not-what-your-community-can-do-for-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/osenetwork.com\/?p=203","title":{"rendered":"Ask Not What Your Community Can Do For You"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post first appeared on Medium. It is reprinted here with permission.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

During his inaugural speech on Jan. 20, 1961, U.S. President John F. Kennedy uttered the challenge, \u201cAnd so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you\u200a\u2014\u200aask what you can do for your country.\u201d Its simple meaning was to challenge society to contribute to improve the public good. But I think there\u2019s a bigger message here, and that is that we have to work together as a society to improve our collective state. And because of that, I think the statement has a lot to tell us about community building in general and for open source communities certainly.<\/p>\n

Publishing software with an open source license is the definitive step of creating an open source project. The creation of such collaborative licensing is Richard Stallman\u2019s brilliant hack on the system of copyright law back in the early 1980s. If software is covered by copyright, so a user of the software must honor the copyright by adhering to its license or otherwise asking for permission, then create licenses that say, \u201cdo whatever you will with this software, while honoring these clauses in return.\u201d It is the perfect hack on a software copyright system that would otherwise collapse under its own weight when the dynamic nature of software encountered the friction-free publishing channel of the Internet. But while publishing software this way is the definitive step of creating an open source project, it doesn\u2019t create a community.<\/p>\n

While many societal norms and interactions are imposed by a choice of where you live, from the country down to your street address, on the Internet those choices and interactions play out differently. The cost of choosing your online community is far lower in the digital world than the economic friction in the world of bricks and mortar. So is the cost of leaving. As an online community you need to attract folks differently if they\u2019re going to engage. You need to make it easy for the community to do the things they want to do. They aren\u2019t coming to help you build your community, at least not at first. They\u2019re coming because the project (the neighborhood) is interesting to their own needs and goals.<\/p>\n

And there are three sorts of folks that join your community.<\/p>\n