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Paul W. Frields has been a Linux user and enthusiast since 1997, and joined the Fedora Project in 2003, shortly after launch. He was a founding member of the Fedora Project Board, and has worked on documentation, website publishing, advocacy, toolchain development, and maintaining software. He joined Red Hat as Fedora Project Leader from February 2008 to July 2010, and remains with Red Hat as an engineering manager. He currently lives with his wife and two children in Virginia.
Authored Comments
The risks of failure, I believe, are not wholly different for open source communities than they are for any other group or entity. Lost time, morale, effort to pick up the pieces and regroup? Those are all problems that I've experienced in other domains as well. The difference with an open source community, I think, is not in what you risk, or what you have to do to cope with the failure -- it's in the requirements of performance, and what you stand to gain by following through on them.
When you fail, provided you're working in the open source way, everyone will (and arguably should) know it. There's no sweeping it under the rug when the project falls apart. Possibly the worst response is trying to obfuscate or hide what's happened. That's simply erecting a barrier to recovery, and in a healthy and scaling community, recovery is meant to happen quickly. Fast recovery can enhance morale, or at least stem its downturn, and ensures that unnecessary resistance to change doesn't build up. This is why objective criteria are so important in open source, just as in any other successful project. Everyone can use the same yardstick and understand when a plan is working, and when it's not. Making those criteria or whatever quantitative measures you're using part of a transparent process is important.
Owning up to failure when it happens also has a side benefit, I believe -- perhaps small, perhaps intangible, but certainly vital -- that balances out (hopefully) a bit of the inevitable pain. By being up front about risk and consequences before, during, and after a failure, you stand to enhance your reputation as a plain dealer, a straight shooter. Community values honesty, because the openness and transparency it engenders is the bedrock upon which the relationships that bind the community together are built. Anyone who's trying to run an open source project, large or small, benefits from providing an environment of honesty. It attracts good contributors, and breeds an atmosphere of mutual respect and dedication among them.
Here's <a href='http://ow.ly/105Sm'>an animation</a> of the work that OpenStreetMap volunteers (through CrisisCommons and elsewhere) have done, making maps available to responders. You'll see the map of Port au Prince explode in detail about halfway through the video.