Chapter 5. Participating as a Business, Non-Profit, or Government Agency

Any manager responsible for decisions about the adoption, production, or participation in Open Source Software will benefit greatly by understanding open source communities of practice. The relationships between Open Source Software projects, community-based production, and open source licenses are critical to those managing technology portfolios: resourcing internal software development, overseeing software and technology procurement, and managing infrastructure operations. Of all of the characteristics that distinguishes open source from proprietary production, it is perhaps the role of community that is most culturally sophisticated and nuanced. While there is clearly a management science, community is just as clearly an art.

This course enables students to understand the various roles in communities of practice supporting Open Source Software development, adoption, and maintenance. Students will assess the characteristics, viability, and appropriateness of the community; how to participate in the community; and the implications of starting new (i.e “forking”) communities. In this course students will learn about different types of communities: management philosophies, community governance, communication strategies, and how they impact the roles and responsibilities of members, the expectations and responsibilities of participants, the motivations of different community members, and how such communities may align—or not—with corporate interests.

By the end of this course, students will be able to:

• Describe the role and value of “community” in Open Source Software production.
• Identify the different roles that individual and organizational participants can take in an Open Source Software community.
• Articulate different approaches to community leadership and management based on roles within an organization and with the wider Open Source Software community.
• Assess the relative strengths and weaknesses of an Open Source Software community.
• Identify the different roles and related management structures within organizations that may contribute to Open Source Software production. 

Open Source Software certainty is not, and may never have been, principally developed “in somebody’s basement.” The production of open, distributed, and community-driven software requires design and development methodologies, and workflows that support the advantages of peer to peer, highly collaborative, iterative production. Without appropriate processes and methods, collective software development can turn into a mess. Open source development processes and methods are at the core of quality and organizational managers need the knowledge and understanding of open development to make informed decisions. Physical and organizational decentralization is promoted not only by open source community development models, but also by the nature of open licensing models and the culture of sharing and contribution that is an important part of many open source projects. Managing a sustainable community responsible for generating critical organizational information and technology assets can be a complex and consequential undertaking.

In this course you will learn about managing community development in relation to the technology infrastructure frequently used to support decentralized workflow for design, development, and distribution. In addition to introducing elements of technical infrastructure including development, community, communication, distribution, and administration tools, students will be introduced to workflows that ensure quality and predictability as well as common project methodologies and approaches.

By the end of this course, students will be able to:

• Develop an implementation plan and make recommendations for production workflow in response to Open Source Software case studies.
• Apply iterative and incremental methodologies to given case studies.
• Differentiate and critique the support, management, and governance of different types of distributed open source communities.
• Describe and assess infrastructure frequently used to support workflows designed to ensure product reliability and project integrity.
• Determine and apply applicable project management methodologies that lend themselves to decentralized development and Open Source values.

---------------

---------------