Being where the conversation is
Nearly all the best things that came to me in life have been unexpected, unplanned by me.
– Carl Sandburg
Open source communities are not something you can completely design. Indeed, you can provide infrastructure, support, and guidance, as we’ve spoken about in this chapter, but the magic of them is when they take on a life of their own. When I was a community manager at SugarCRM, I remember always being amazed and delighted at the interesting extensions that the community members built and the motivations behind them. Linus Torvalds did an interview a few years back, and when asked about what was surprising about Linux development, he said the following:
“What I find interesting is code that I thought was stable continually gets improved. There are things we haven’t touched for many years, then someone comes along and improves them or makes bug reports in something I thought no one used. We have new hardware, new...
