Article on Community
From AlfrescoWiki
Contents |
[edit] The Alfresco Ecosystem
Alfresco Chutes and Ladders? :) The diagram below is incomplete but begins to show how the Alfresco community can work to create an ecosystem and how the some of the roles interact. Note that many activities cause benificial feedback loops which lead to a strong community, a strong product and thus a strong business model for Alfresco, Service Integrators, and Customers.
[edit] Community Roles
Russ Comment: One of the interesting things here is that the committership is entirely employee based. This may have to do with the desires of Alfresco, or simply that the product is young and there have not been any significant experts to emerge in the community yet. In the long run it seems that diversifying the committership to include the community will show that the community is gaining in status and will allow the alfresco organization to more clearly hear the voice of the community.
[edit] Innovator
Many if not most of the mature open source communities are based around the infrastructure space. Innovators in these projects are technical contributors. The application space is a new frontier in open source. As we travel up the stack from infrastructural open source like operating systems and application frameworks to the application space the scope of the individuals attracted to the project is much different. Less technical, business oriented individuals now fall within the scope of the project. Alfresco is both infrastructural and application. There is room for the entire spectrum of innovators. Our challenge is to lower the barrier to entry for innovation.
Tools like the wiki make it easy for non technical innovators to help create documentation and propose ideas but it does not enable them to actualize thier ideas.
Javascript and the various other development toolkits lower the level of programming prowless needed to develop solutions but innovators still need to be programmers
The question is what types of tools do we need to incorperate in order to allow non technical people to create through composition and declaration based on existing components?
[edit] Community
- component of ecosystem - "web of life"
- friends
- casual members
- innovators
[edit] Building the community
This chart is not finished by any means (so feel free to get involved here!) Maturing the community is a process. Some needs are more basic then other. This chart is modeled after Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
[edit] Basic Needs (Biolocal needs
Biological needs are the tools that any open source project / community need to "get the job done." These are the basic tools of collaboration which enable a community distributed throughout the world but connected by the internet to collaborate.
What tools are needed depend on what kind of project you have, what type of collaboration is needed, and who is collaborating. A project like Linux, Spring, Mysql, or hibernate has different biological needs than a project like Sugar CRM, or Alfresco because their communities involve different types of innovators.
[edit] Safety
The stage of safety in open source is the feeling of reliability. This means that the community and its resources are reliable.
