"Open source software communities are one of the most successful -and least understood- examples of high-performance collaboration and community-building on the Internet today. Other types of communities could benefit enormously ..."

Interesting report with some data on the nature of open source software development communities, including both demographics and the results of a survey that asked the "Reasons to Join an Open Source Community" (top answer: "Learn and develop new skills") and the "Most Important Benefits of Participation" (top answer: "Increased personal knowledge base").

Written by Eugene Eric Kim at Blue Oxen Associates,  the report also presents some interesting metrics on collaboration in two largish projects (through the analysis of discussion forums and email) and offers these three guidelines to building collaboration learned from the open source community:

- Evolve the Community
-  Lead by Example
- Let Users Talk to Developers

- via [carvingCode]

7:06:19 PM    

This links to a page I've built which aggregates RSS feeds from all of the LORs that I know of that produce them.

There's been a lot flying around recently concerning the use of RSS to syndicate RLOs. I've been trying to wrap my head around the implications but haven't fully managed to. This list, rather than being an attempt to create some sort of authoritative resource on the subject, is instead a way for me to see with my own eyes, all in one place, the results of current efforts to match RSS technology with LORs/RLOs. I need to do this because when the topics get this complex, my brain seems to need to work at the problem from both ends - both by trying to construct a theoretical model of the problem based on my understanding of the issues, the technologies and concepts at play, and also by literally looking at examples of what exists or what a solution could look like and then trying to bring these two together into some fit. In any case, that's my motivation for throwing this together. - SWL

7:04:50 PM