Chris Grams

I read the oss governance model blog post this morning... fantastic... might even be worth sending some of these ideas to our elected officials:)

What I think the open source movement has in spades that the typical corporate environment often lacks (or certainly doesn't cultivate well) is leadership. I think there is a big difference between a leadership culture and a management culture.

In most corporations, management = status = power. The people who have the most people working for them have the loudest voices in the direction of the organization.

In many open source projects, the people who 1) have good ideas or 2) do stuff, have the status and power. And the people who have good ideas and do stuff tend to have lots of folks start to follow them.

Management becomes a side effect of leadership, rather than the other way around.

In many businesses there are people in management positions who are also put in leadership positions by default, not because they have ideas or do stuff, but because they have a lot of people working for them.

In fact many of these folks neither have ideas nor do stuff. It is sad. It is bureaucracy. And it is damage that the OSS movement has done a pretty good job of routing around, in my opinion.