A response to: What makes a community?

A recent tweet of mine resulted in Martin Widlake to write a really great blog post about What makes a community. Please read it before you continue to read this. There was another response from Stefan Koehler which is worth mentioning as well.

Both, Martin and Stefan, speak about Oracle communities because this is were they are involved in. At the beginning of Martin’s post he writes: “Daniel was not specific about if this was a work/user group community or a wider consideration of society, …” and this was intentional. I don’t think that it really matters much if we speak about a community around a product, a community that just comes together for drinking beer and to discuss the latest football results or even if we talk about a community as a family. At least in the German translation “Gemeinschaft” applies to a family as well. This can be a very few people (mother,father,kids) or more if we include brothers, sisters, grandmas and so on. But still the same rules that Martin outlines in hist blog post apply: You’ll always have people driving the community such as organizing dinners (when we speak about families), organizing conferences (when we speak about technical communities) or organizing parties (when we talk about fun communities) or organizing whatever for whatever people make up the specific community. Then you’ll always have the people willing to help (the people Martin describes as the people who share and/or talk) and you’ll always have the people that consume/attend which is good as well, because without them you’d have nothing to share and to organize.

We at dbi services are a community as well. As we work with various products the community is not focused on a specific product (well, it is in the area of a specific product, of course) but rather on building an environment we like to work in. The community here is tight to technology but detached from a single product. We share the same methodologies, the same passion and have fun attending great parties that are organized mostly by the non technical people in our company. In this case you could say: The non-technical people are the drivers for the community of the company even if the company is very technical from its nature. And here we have the same situation again: Some organize, some attend/consume and some share, but all are required (as Martin outlined in his post as well).

Of course I have to say something about the PostgreSQL community: Because PostgreSQL is a real community project the community around it is much more important than with other technical communities. I do not say that you do not need a community for vendor controlled products because when the vendor fails to build a community around its product the product will fail as well. What I am saying is that the PostgreSQL community goes deeper as the complete product is driven by the community. Of course there are companies that hire people working for the community but they are not able to influence the direction if there is no agreement about the direction in the community. Sometimes this can make it very hard to progress and a lot of discussions need to be discussed but at the end I believe it is better to have something which the majority agrees on. In the PostgreSQL community I think there are several drivers: For sure all the developers are drivers, the people who take care of all the infrastructure (mailing lists, commitfests, …) are drivers as well. Basically everybody you can see on the mailing lists and answers questions are drivers because they keep the community active. Then we have all the people you see in other communities as well: Those who share and those who consume/attend. I think you get the point: An open source community is by its nature far more active than what you usually see for non-opensource communities for one reason: It already starts with the developers and not with a community around a final product. You can be part of such a community from the very beginning, which is writing new features and patches.

Coming back to the original question: What makes a community? Beside what Martin outlined there are several other key points:

• The direction of the community (no matter if technical or not) must be so that people want to be part of that
• When we speak about a community around a product: You must identify yourself with the product. When the product goes into a direction you can not support for whatever reason you’ll leave, sooner or later. The more people leave, the weaker the community
• It must be easy to participate and to get help
• A lot of people are willing to spend (free-) time to do stuff for the community
• There must be a culture which respects you and everybody else
• Maybe most important: A common goal and people that are able and willing to work together, even if this sometimes requires a lot of discussions

When you have all of these, the drivers, the people who share, and those that attend will come anyway, I believe.