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Comments? Is there anything the community thinks we could do to address the situation?
Brian ... http://www.sdmagazine.com/documents/sdm0411b/
yeah, i got comments.
The single most toxic thing that you can do to an open source project is to circle the wagons and shun outsiders. Open source projects work by achieving a balance between good people at the core and a horde of talent on the outside. The balance is the key.
This article is just a series of cheap shots. Open source is elitist, Open source is hoarding opportunities; in particular from women. Open source is using it's power offensively against outsiders. It wraps that all up by using the analogy of the man/woman dialectic.
First: All organizations have a core of people at the center; so you can always accuse any organization of being a clique because they all are. It's a cheap shot. It is much harder to judge if the organization is too much or too little a clique. Anybody with a clue about open source knows that we work very hard on that problem every day. Or to put it another way your not working on that problem you don't have a clue.
So the accusation of being too much of a clique is a very serious one. Is the 'open' a lie? Is the absence of women in the statistics a sign of some deep flaw? I doubt it. Why? Because any projects that shuns outsiders is shooting it's self in the foot. Projects that: fail to welcome new comers; fail to bring in credible new contributors ... well they are just stupid. They will ultimately become dysfunctional and implode.
That's not to say that it doesn't happen. If you circle the wagons and ignore outsiders then you usually get a short burst of higher productivity; and you get the fun of being all righteous and 3lite. It's just not durable.
This is the accusation that open projects are hoarding some opportunities. Well duh! All communities, all institutions, hoard opportunities - for example we hoard commit rights. Healthy open communities strive to hoard the absolute minimum number of opportunities to assure they can stay coordinated and maintain some level of quality. Everything else you struggle to giving away because if you succeed you maximize the level of innovation.
Second: The article decides to play with fire. When ever a them/us boundary appears - and they always appear around any community - you can trot out all the old cliches. Old/young, black/white, first-world/third-world, man/woman, rich/poor, big/little - take your pick. In reasonable proportion this kind of reasoning by analogy can be very enlightening. But that isn't the intent of the authors here. They are not attempting to enlighten. They are attempting to polarize. To drag the open source movement into the tar pit of one particular them/us boundary.
The culture is full of very highly polarized them/us boundaries rich/poor, man/woman, race, language - just to pick four. It is delusional to pretend that the open source movement wouldn't suffer from a high degree of statistical correlation with all of them. Sometime the alignment is greater, sometime lesser - but it isn't our job to fix those. It's our job to fix the them/us boundary around who owns our particular region of the commons.
The right problem for us to worry about is that we need to always strive to bring more people into the loop. For example we do a terrible job of getting visual thinkers into the loop because our entire coordination framework is based around text. For example our anglo-saxon roots has created cultural conventions that make it hard for huge regions of the planet to join the fun. For example we are suffering some serious growth pains that are making the coordination problems much more difficult but meanwhile we are afraid of the power that might accrue to entity we charged with solving those coordination problems.
The man/woman dialectic is just not useful as a way of tackling the challenges of how to make an open project grow and remain functional. It's the kind of analogy drives out intelligent thought [as Stefano scratches his ass - indeed].
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