Sharing Nicely

This is my first posting for the Open Governance course, which I am both facilitating and participating in (yes, peer learning at its best). The assignment, readings and links to other participants’ posts are all on this page:

http://p2pu.org/node/5618/forums/9614

I wont’ go into a lot of detail on the content of the readings, but they deal with community behavior observed among baboons in East Africa, where norms fundamentally changed due to an external influence, and remained robust over time. I take away two starting points from the radiolab programme for our discussion of open governance.

• New and fundamentally different community norms can emerge suddenly (and by accident) and don’t require slow evolutionary processes.
• The new community norms thus established, can remain robust even when new members join the community, who are used to the traditional norms and behaviors.

The question of norms and values, and how they are conveyed to new members of a community are important for all organizations, but more so in open communities. There are at least two reasons for this. Open communities show higher levels of fluidity in membership. New participants constantly join communities, and others leave, and there are usually few opportunities for formal “orientation”. Different from traditional firms, norms and values are not fixed by hierarchical power structures and rarely questioned. On the contrary, the community constantly engages with them in action and discourse.

All communities have norms and practicies (“the way we do things around here”) even if they might not be clearly articulated or expressed. And even if they are articulated somewhere, they might still not be obvious to newcomers. As in the baboon example newcomers join a community with their own set of values and behaviors, and with expectations regarding the community norms, and might lack interest or skill to observe and adapt to existing community norms. The baboons required a “mentor” to help them figure out what was different. Interestingly, for the baboons this mentor’s role was mainly to comfort the new joiner – rather than lecture or instruct them on how they should behave.

The set of questions this raises for me, is related to the strategies that open communities will take with respect to newcomers. Are these strategies designed to make new joiners feel comfortable and at ease, and does that work in open communities as well as it does for baboons? (I realize I am moving on increasingly thin ice here – “Schmidt calls open source developers apes?” – I am not doing that!)

If our hypothesis is that communities will take different strategies to convey prevailing norms, and that they react differently when norms are questioned, or attacked, it would be interesting to look at a few examples in a little more detail.

I am glad to say that on the P2pU-community mailing list, we have seen a lot of the good baboon like behavior. When new joiners introduce themselves, or are introduced by an existing subscriber, there is usually a flurry of emails responding to their interests and just saying “hello – great to see you here.” I hadn’t thought about it in these terms, but I think those first messages go a long way towards making people feel at ease, and appreciated and as a result there is little risk they will act defensively.

At the same time, we’ve had a few occasions where community members sent short or terse emails that sometimes cut discussion short. I received messages off list from community members who stated they weren’t replying to emails that seemed negative and not constructive. As a result I kept a eye on messages from the person who had been sending these emails and would have contacted them off list if the same dynamics had continued. Fortunately, the tone of the emails was mostly related to stress that had nothing to do with P2PU and evened out after a little while. For me, it was great that the community had a self-warn system where individual members would first flag a potential problem off-list. What we haven’t had to deal with is to resolve this kind of conflict on the list, and that will be a real test.

I am running out of time here, but I remember a Google Tech talk about dealing with difficult developers joining an open source community and it would be useful to go back to the talk and compare the suggested strategies, to the “make them feel comfortable” approach discussed here. Has anyone else seen this and might still have the link?

Great week 1 and it’s a challenge to keep up the reading and writing. But learning doesn’t come for free!