Communities grow by non sequitur

In adapting Open Source processes into the enterprise context, we want to take the best of the available Open Source tools — and community needs to be viewed as an important tool, not merely a byproduct.  And there are a few Open Source tools that we want to leave behind, such as "indefinite schedules" and "transient workforce," but that means we have to "crank up the volume" somewhere else, in compensation.  Once again, community is among the best options.  And of course anything new that’s contrary to traditional enterprise work styles and best practices needs some special attention.  And once again, that’s community all over.

Enterprises tend to work by "command and control", which is a very efficient way to communicate but a really hopeless way to commune.  Communities, on the other hand, depend on a certain amount of conversation not strictly related to the task at hand — on non sequitur — which is not really very efficient for communication, but seems to be essential for community. The Cluetrain Manifesto calls it "the human voice."  Depending on your community, non sequitur may happen at the coffee pot, on the golf course, at the coffee pot, in email, blogs, wikis, instant messaging, IRC, Jabber, or Twitter, but it doesn’t seem to be possible to have a community without it.

The need for non sequitur is at the heart of Redeeming the Commons.  Building community means caring about success for each other beyond what makes us personally successful: the good of all, not just the good of me.  If you deal with coworkers like Coke machines, you’re not going to care much about their needs—nor they, about yours.  You need to engage them off-topic, because community is off-topic: a higher topic, a more productive topic, but still a different topic than your immediate deliverables.

So: pick a conversational tool (or better yet, let the community choose). Find a community leader.  Have them encourage contribution, and reward it with recognition.  Find the people who aren’t contributing and help them join the conversation.  Let the community decide what to discuss: you’ll find a lot of baseball scores and baby stories; you’ll also find a lot of design thinking, resource sharing, requirements clarification … you’ll find your Commons.

Jack Repenning

Jack Repenning is Chief Technology Officer at CollabNet. Jack joined CollabNet in 2002; as chief product architect he was primarily responsible for building the product architecture that enabled CollabNet to grow its user base to well over one million users. Jack is also an early member of the wildly successful Subversion open source project, a version control system that is widely viewed as the de facto new industry standard. Consistently engaged in developer productivity topics, Jack has participated in open source software projects since the early 1980’s. Prior to joining CollabNet, Jack worked at well-known Silicon Valley companies such as Hewlett Packard, SGI, Informix, and Rational where he developed expertise in a wide range of technical areas, ranging from inside the kernel to GUI and database design, as well as data center deployment architecture. Jack holds degrees in Electrical Engineering and Information and Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine.

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