Sharing Nicely

As part of my new do-it-right-away-if-it-takes-only-a-minute-or-five strategy, here is a short quote from Glyn Moody’s article on how to become Linus Torvalds. It’s a concise description of the kind of leadership I would love to see engrained in the way P2PU grows up. Especially the highlighted (my highlight, not Glyn’s) sentence is worth repeating repeating repeating repeating … a few hundred times as part of the morning chant. Ronald Heifetz, whose book on Leadership I am (still) reading speaks of the same spirit of leadership that is grounded in authority conferred by the community.

Linus has developed what amounts to a new way of managing large-scale projects involving huge numbers of geographically-dispersed contributors. Although the final decisions rest with him, he takes them in consultation with a wide range of coders. He is constantly involved in discussions on key mailing lists that allow important issues to be raised by anyone. Ultimately, then, he leads in part by being able to sense what the collective will of the Linux development community is on particular issues, and by not straying too far from it.

Now, there is only one Linus, but I believe that general approach is starting to move out into other spheres. In part, that’s because adaptations of the open source development methodology – based on a modular, distributed, collaborative development model – are being applied in more and more fields, from content to science and even to government. That approach brings with it a need for a different kind of management: top-down just doesn’t work in these circumstances. And so, as well as the novel business model that free software implies, discussed in my last column, it has also engendered a radically new way of running things.