Herding free-range cats from the just-added-to-my-blogroll Aldon Hynes is a nice look at the recent CivicSpace developer summit from someone with considerable experience at both software development and group dynamics.
There were a lot of talk about usability, the interface and the users’ experience of CivicSpace. There were discussions of architecture and long-term goals. There was a big of a split between the developers and user interface people, and questions about how functionality should be implemented led to long drawn out discussions. Another dynamic was between the need for immediate fixes and action items to come out in the first version, and longer-term goals….
Open source programmers are the feral free-range cats. Herding them is even more of a challenge….
One of the first things I’ve always tried to focus on with any group I’ve been part of is defining the primary task. I was somewhat frustrated by a lack of clarity in terms of a primary task or specific sets of apparent goals for the summit….
There wasn’t a clear understanding of how all the different people involved in CivicSpace interact, or how we would define success. Yet in many ways, this was highly appropriate. CivicSpace seems committed to a bottom-up, emergent approach to activism. People work on what is important to them, and from that a true vision emerges. In many ways, the summit exemplified this approach….
However, I did observe that I’ve worked with other groups with much clearer goals, and leaders with much stronger personalities that were not able to get nearly as much done as CivicSpace has been getting done. In spite of all the different personalities, goals, agendas, etc., CivicSpace is doing important work, not only in developing and distributing some important software, but also in modeling how progressive open source software groups can work together…..
