Learning about community

Communities that form around open source and open hardware tend to have a strong DIY — Do It Yourself — focus. At its best, this can result in innovation and value creation on multiple fronts. At its worst, this risks getting caught up in NIH syndrome, where anything Not Invented Here seems unworthy of our time. Chris Cormack brought a message [WebM] to linux.conf.au to warn against letting NIH affect our approach to community building and to encourage us to look beyond ourselves to learn about community. He himself identified as a member of two very different communities and found that the wisdom of the more ancient culture was quite beneficial in building the nascent one.

In the first place he is a Māori — the people who have inhabited New Zealand for the last 700 years. He does not look like a typical Māori and admitted that he is probably one of the palest Māoris you will see. He described himself as a "stealth" Māori, though he can trace his lineage back 47 generations. Today the south island of New Zealand is known for its spectacular beauty but, when Cormack's forebears arrived centuries ago, they found a land that was "freezing cold, where nothing would grow, and that had no land mammals". Without the food, transport, and labor that such mammals might provide, building a strong, healthy community was important for survival.

The second community Cormack identified with was the development community for the Koha open-source library-management system. Koha was built by Cormack and some colleagues when a local library discovered, with only a few months to spare, that its current proprietary system had a Y2K problem that could not be fixed. Motivated by those immortal words "how hard can it be?", they started learning about libraries and building software — managing to go live on January 3, 2000.

The Koha community has grown over the years (though not so much in New Zealand or Australia as might have been hoped) with installations around the world, translations to "30ish" languages and a great deal of diversity. Cormack particularly noted that the combination of librarians (traditionally female) and developers (traditionally male) has resulted in an unusually good gender balance. He was also rather proud to have received security fixes from a Benedictine monk, accessibility fixes from a blind Buddhist monk, and was still hoping to hear from a Trappist monk as they apparently make good beer.

Cormack noted a few Māori proverbs that focused on community, several of which had close English equivalents such as "many hands make light work" or "we stand on the shoulders of giants", but structured his presentation around five Māori terms that are part of common discourse in that culture. They serve to sum up that community's wisdom and to remind us of some important values. While these terms might superficially seem familiar, some carry an emphasis that can challenge our thinking.

Mana tangata — from where comes your reputation?

"Mana", we were told, is a term you will often hear in New Zealand. It can be translated as "respect" or "prestige", but it is more; it is much richer than these terms. A possible cognate that came up in other talks during the week is "reputation" — how we are known to and are perceived by others.

In her keynote [WebM] on Friday, where she discussed some of her research as an anthropologist looking at people interacting with technology, Genevieve Bell observed that people have a wide range of responses to issues of privacy: some are very protective, some give their data away without a second thought. However, when the conversation is turned around to be about reputation, responses are much more focused. People care about their reputation, realize that it can be based on even the tiny things they do, and are concerned about ubiquitous surveillance affecting their reputation even if they don't care about privacy.

"Mana tangata" presents a sharp contrast to this perspective of reputation based on what we have done. Rather, it refers to respect/prestige/strength/value/reputation that comes not from what you have done, but from the community you are a part of. Cormack offered a quote that he particularly liked from author Michael P. Shirres, who explained the concept this way: "To be a person is not to stand alone, but to be one with one's people and the deeper the oneness the more we are truly persons and have that mana tangata."

This view of reputation or prestige coming from community does not conflict with the view of it coming from actions, but is really just an alternate perspective that can lead to a different way of thinking. Cormack demonstrated this by linking mana tangata with the importance of welcoming people into a community. By doing this, by connecting people with ourselves, we build up their mana as well as strengthen our community.

This idea of the importance of giving, not just of gaining, reputation is central to the thoughts Katie McLaughlin had to share in her five minutes of "lightning talk" in the final session of the conference. In part, McLaughlin was championing the "#LABHR" initiative: Let's All Build a Hat Rack. To "hang your hat on" something is an idiom for basing your reputation on that something. Building on that analogy, a hat rack could be a collection of skills, experiences, contributions, etc. that together form a person's reputation. We can all participate in building hat racks by publicizing and celebrating the contributions of others, particularly the otherwise unseen contributions.

This is a slightly different emphasis than the one presented by Cormack. In mana tangata, the community doesn't provide the reputation, it is the reputation. However, it is a practical way of seeing reputation as something that a community gives, rather than something an individual must gain.

Whakanuia — effective teaching

"Whakanuia" is pronounced with an "F" sound for the "Wh". Cormack summarized it as an approach to teaching focused on "reward the good, ignore the bad". He gave examples of a couple of gifts he had received from grateful members of the Koha community. These were of minimal monetary value (e.g. a jar of peanut butter), but of significant community-building and motivational value. Little rewards can have a big effect.

In the other direction, Cormack described his "unsung heroes" announcements. Many projects announce lists of new features and fixed bugs. For Koha there are regular lists of contributors and contributions. This is more than just a list of authors from a Git log; it identifies a mix of contributions both tangible and intangible, both named and anonymous, as every contributor deserves to be celebrated.

Cormack did not expand on the importance of ignoring the bad, and maybe that is for the best. Maybe it is beneficial to just save our energies for celebrating the good that we see.

Kaiakopono — mentorship

This is probably the least challenging of the ideas that were presented. "Kaiakopono" means much the same as "mentoring", though perhaps with an extra spoonful of "welcoming" thrown in. Cormack borrowed an interpretation from author Esther Schindler, who wrote: "Not everyone needs to be the welcome wagon — but someone ought to be."

The importance of mentoring seems to be well understood in open-source communities; there are a range of programs that encourage and support it. There is little to take away from this Māori term except maybe to be reminded of what we already know is important. It is also rewarding: Cormack rejoiced in the "massive buzz" he gets when someone he'd been helping doesn't need help any more.

Korerorero and whakaaro whānui — conflict and resolution

Conflict and disagreement are inevitable in any community. How a community handles those inevitabilities can shape how the community is perceived — it certainly appears that many see the Linux kernel community in terms of the conflicts on its mailing list.

Korerorero, according to Cormack, is somewhere between "argue" and "discuss". It is about coming together to address issues and to present opinions and to gain understanding. It is also about eating and drinking together. It seems that something different happens when discussions, particularly passionate discussions, are held around a meal table. Maybe it is the reminder of community, or perhaps the food distracts those with less firm opinions. Cormack highlighted the success of the "KohaCon" conferences that meet in a different country each year; he noted that all of his photos from the conferences seemed to have wine bottles on the tables.

Face-to-face meetings are clearly not always possible in a global community, so when they do take place, it is important to understand how to make the most of them. Learning from a different community that handles meetings effectively certainly seems like good advice. This makes one wonder how the Kernel Summit would go if the meetings were over a meal instead of between meals.

The outcome of korerorero will hopefully be "whakaaro whānui". This is people in agreement. It may not be complete unanimity, but Cormack characterized the outcome as one in which no one may be blamed if the result doesn't work out, but where everyone shares the credit when it does. This seems very close to the "rough consensus" that has been a big part of enabling the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) community.

This was highlighted by George Fong in his keynote address [WebM] on Tuesday, when he reminded us of some of the details of how the Internet was built; he noted the IETF, which has been quite successful over many decades and "simply works" despite the fact that: "There isn't a single law in place that governs them, there isn't a single overarching governance process which is imposed on them."

To explain the reason for that success, he quoted David Clark who is recorded in "The Tao of IETF" as saying: "We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code."

Fong's thoughts on the IETF can be used to assess other communities. Running code is something that is highly valued throughout the open-source world. Whether rough consensus is so highly valued is less clear. It is certainly not hard to identify projects, both past and present, that demonstrated a degree of success with real working code, but for which there was no community consensus — rough or otherwise. Some of these have brought about both real technological value and significant community division. Whether the one was worth the other is an interesting question. It probably depends on which one values more: the technology or the community.

He aha te mea nui?

That question leads quite nicely to the title of Cormack's talk, "He aha te mea nui?", which roughly translates as "What is the most important thing?". The traditional answer is "he tangata, he tangata, he tangata": the people, the people, the people. It is clear that for Cormack and the Koha community, it is the people and the community that are most important. The technology certainly has importance, but its true importance derives from how it provides access to knowledge, allows people to contribute, and encourages everyone to be involved.

Whether the community exists to serve the technology or the technology exists to serve the community, it is clear that a healthy community is important. But it is also often clear that technologists aren't experts in that area. Cormack's final encouragement was to learn from communities by joining them. There are plenty of communities around us that have been learning from their mistakes for much longer than the Internet or free software has been around. We might learn something by observing, by volunteering, or by joining. Many of the challenges we face are not new at all.