Why community matters for the future of software talent, products and the industry as a whole
We all love those stand up guys who volunteer first, arrive early and are last to leave from meetups, collaborations and indeed anything software related. They are sharing the passion, they are showing the love!! This is the good side of software as defined by the people within the industry who seek a better world through software using their passion to drive progress in an impressive way.
These channels of passion ultimately lead to the open source movement and in recent years have transformed the industry into a collaborative landscape where more and more software professionals are building their own products. They are contributing to more and more engineering led projects that are “pure” software in terms of process and culture. Many in established business are not comfortable with this as the threat of disruption is ever present when you have a collaboration of highly skilled software professionals in a room focused on a single problem. This may in part arise from the need for management ‘control’ (v ‘influence’) in allot of company cultures. This has often caused culture clashes between software professionals and management trying to stamp a traditional leadership style on a team leading to resistance and culture clashes to boot. It’s my view that this lack of understanding coupled with passion for software is one of the elements that has fuelled the transition to the open source model where software professionals freely collaborate over common problems they are passionate about leading to real world solutions that often carry commercial value.
So, with the rise of Web 2.0, the startup industry and the freemium model for tech companies in full swing, there are some highly profitable businesses out there that have their origins in the open source movement and prove the open source paradigm of collaboration does work turning more and more its detractors into supporters as time passes. Since the “OSS” train has left the station, we all should not forget where we are and where we come from when it comes to the open source movement. We should show the love in OSS through the following:
- Enable a better quality of life with a life long commitment to the open source movement and the real world problems it solves
- Widen scope from the selective and often poorly structured curriculum of education, which produces newly minted software developers and engineers. This should be done by providing entry points into software through community education free of charge for those aspiring to be software professionals
- Provide continuous learning and development for established software professionals in upgraded and newly released products via community learning and education
- Provide facilities free of charge to identified open source community groups that engage in community education and learning for new as well as established software professionals
- Understand what actually makes a good software professional and identify these personalities upon entry into a the community education network ergo the community will retain and develop such individuals as part of OSS succession planning.
- Work with industry under a common mission statement on what makes for a successful partnership with the open source software movement
What makes it all happen? I think it's simply passionate software professionals who by nature, not by training or experience care deeply about they do and want their skills to make a difference in the world. The more we actively show the love, the bigger the impact we have as a community. If we draw from our past and not let our past draw from us, we can make a better future that allows the OSS movement to take its rightful and sustainable place in the world today as the premiere software partner to business and society as a whole.
About the author: John Mulhall is a Community Manager and newly Minted Software Developer. John is also a committed blogger and from February 2016 onwards, will be publishing blogs every second week on topics around Technology, Leadership and Sustainable Capitalism.
Sources/Credits:
Pics;
No comments:
Post a Comment