YouSaid · the spoken record

Danielle Morrill

lines on the record: 68
first: 2022-08-11
most recent: 2022-08-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“This reminds me one of my favorite quotes from Quest Love. This is from his book, Creative Quest. He basically writes that when you make work, you are the creator, but also the eventual audience, which I think is such a powerful idea. There's like so many different ways to interpret that. What I love about your book is that it's not a grand theory of everything. It ties together lots of different themes together in a really meaningful way, but you can also tease them apart regardless of your vantage point, whether you're a creator, open source, business, however you might define a company or any form of coordination and collaboration. I also appreciate, given that you were kind of newer to the community compared to sort of the first, early generations, that you don't bring this sort of chip of nostalgia and sort of come at it from a very first principles approach and just sort of really bring all your insights together. So I just want to thank you for working in public, the making and maintenance of open source software. I'm going to add my own personal sub-ed, which is, and many, many other kinds.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Today. It's fun to think about the opportunity we have in front of us to actually design from scratch and thinking like how would we have these sort of scaled social interactions? And so disambiguating the idea of public and participatory can just lead to really fruitful new ways of communicating.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The community's size or shape is just so unwieldy that that's not really possible. And so it is okay to say these are the decisions that are being made and we don't have to make this to a vote every time we want to decide what we want to do and maybe also on the flip side that depending what type of community you are overseeing, there are ways to bring those active voices and contributors into leadership and encourage more people to participate. But again, it depends on whether you're on this like high growth side or low growth side. On the communication tools side, I think this idea that separating the ideas of public and participatory is just going to lead to a lot of really interesting things happening in the near future. Just getting playful with the idea that a community does not mean that everyone is participating at equal volume and shouting each other because we've seen with like every social platform that gets pretty hard at scale. And so like as we're creating new things.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of the leadership side. On the leadership side, I think it's again about knowing your community and not being afraid to be decisive. A lot of communities that I've looked at have suffered in one direction or the other of either being overly differential.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I might even add that crypto is great for that because that's where you can actually port some of your currency, your reputation currency and provenance in a way that like in blockchains. And then finally, advice for leadership and or communication tools, because we've talked a lot about, I think a lot of times people make the mistake of talking a lot about collaboration and coordination, but they don't often talk about the communication part of things. And this is particularly heightened in our remote world. So any advice you have on the communication tool side and then anything for the leadership side.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Platforms, I would say, take your creators seriously and the responsibility and the relationship that you have to them. And what I mean by that is that platforms are really the only place to create these closed status economies that enable creators to continue doing their work for however long they want and to open up all these amazing opportunities for creators. And sometimes that doesn't directly happen on your platform, as in like maybe it's not that they can raise money directly on your platform, but it is important to make their status legible to others so that they can take that clout and that reputation and actually like shop it around to turn it into other opportunities.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're basically saying know the difference of whether you have a cluther or a stadium. And by the way, you quoted that person talking about the Newtonian phase. Who knows? There might be times when you can have both in one place. So that can change. And then how about advice for platforms?”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For community managers, first thought is just know what kind of community you're in charge of, which is where I think it's helpful to have a set of different models in your mind of are you actively trying to bring in lots more contributors? It's okay if you're not some communities do better on contributor retention and less so on contributor growth, and that's totally fine. Or is it the kind of thing where there is a lot of work that needs to be done and you think you stand a chance of recruiting more people, then go recruit more people? It's fine to have a community that isn't super high growth but is stable. It's fine to have a community that is extremely high growth where you're trying to bring in lots of different kinds of members and make it this really bustling kind of federation style community. It's fine to have just one person that is sort of standing up in front of a crowd. That is a community in its own form. It just requires different sorts of strategies to figure out how to manage it.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But for the most part, like anybody can just comment on my tweet and jump in. And so understanding, I think both what her theory of the commons was and why it doesn't really apply to today can help answer some of these questions about is it okay to have comment threads that are entirely open to everyone? What are the problems that might arise from that? And then what can we do to actually limit interactions from outsiders so that the people that are most involved and have most skin in the game can actually get stuff done? And it's a difficult thing to talk about because it can be taken as gatekeeping or trying to keep other people from participating. It's just like a touchy subject. I can't say that we should just close off the boundaries entirely. And I think this gets to, again, the idea of you can have things that are public but not participatory. It's okay to make software that anyone can use. That doesn't mean that everybody who uses your software can also participate in its production. So it's really just about finding kind of like a middle ground there.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, in order for a commons to function in this healthy way, you need to have these underlying conditions of high contact, of having skin in the game, of having clearly defined membership, among a bunch of other things that I won't get into here. Her work is finding, I think, renewed appeal right now, especially because people are trying to answer these questions in open source and in online communities elsewhere of just like, how can communities self-manage and not implode over time? There is so much that is relevant about her work to today. I think it mostly applies though to the concept of clubs clubs basically being this commons where everyone has a stake in what they're creating. If we think about a stadium, a creator's community that is on a very public social platform, the whole concept of the commons kind of breaks down, right? Like, I mean, if I'm tweeting in public, anybody can read what I'm saying. And until recently as Twitter is now making it possible for people to limit comments on their tweets and things like that.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Discount rate is just this idea that if you're invested in the community for a long period of time, you're not planning on hopping in, saying something rude if this applies to online communities, and then just sort of like hopping out and disappearing. You're like, I'm stuck here. I need to actually learn how to work with everybody else.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. High context, high trust is a really important implication of having these clear membership boundaries. And then the other thing I'll point to is the idea of having a low discount rate, which is just saying that if you're a member of this community, you expect to be around for a while.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yep, that creates trust. That's what creates trust. It's just like in a company. They say the best advice you can give to any team or any fast growing group is the more shared context, the more trust you have because you can do more shortcuts together in your work.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Them into principles for if you are in this situation where you have this shared resource, how can you manage it without everyone just sort of taking for themselves? And so I talk about her conditions in the book a bit and the ones that I'll point to that are most relevant for this conversation are this idea that in order to have a well-managed commons, you do need to draw boundaries around membership. It needs to be clear who is allowed to appropriate from the Commons and who isn't. And then with that, there are all these implications of, well, what does it mean to be a member of the Commons? A couple of things that I'll highlight are, one, this idea that you have high context for your interactions with other people that are also members.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. So Eleanor Ostrom was a researcher who became well known for her work around trying to understand why the tragedy of the commons occurs and how we might avoid it or move around it. Tragedy of the Commons just sort of being that if everyone has access to a shared resource, you can imagine a fishery or a forest. Anyone can cut down wood in the forest. But if everyone does that and just kind of does what they want for themselves, then eventually that forest is going to be depleted unless it is managed in some shape or form. And so Chaging the Comms is this concept from ages ago that is maybe one possible outcome of the cons, but it's almost like when people talk about comms, they always talk about tragedy of the commas as though you can't have like a non-traged of the commons. And so Eleanor Ostrom is basically looking at what are situations where commons are being sustainably self-managed. And she did decades of research looking at these fisheries and forests and just like different examples of commons's and then documenting what she found and summarizing.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Part And so to summarize, the clubs are the projects, the spaces with high contributor growth and low user growth, like these private messaging groups. The stadiums are like the projects with a low contributor growth and high user growth like these newsletters and podcasts. I really think Nadia, one of the best things about your book is this framework of the federations, the clubs, the stadiums, the toys, because you dehomogenize this phrase open source and community. And then it correspondingly gives people frameworks for what that means for how you build support, nurture that. So I'm now going to switch to asking you some practical questions about that. Platforms are having a moment.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Map really well to the clubs that I sort of identified here. Whereas stadiums apply to both these creator communities are happening in very public platforms, but I think can also help us understand why things like podcasts and newsletters are having such a great moment in the sun right now, because they're designed for that one-sided parasocial type of community where if we're recording a podcast right now, it's just a conversation between me and you. And yes, hopefully thousands of people will be listening to it later, but there were sort of like doing this in public, meaning that we're publishing our conversation, but we're not actively interacting with the audience that might be listening to us. And similarly with the newsletter, I can write this long form post and share my thoughts in a higher context situation. I assume or hope that most of the people subscribing have some context for who I am. And then I can kind of send it out and people can read on their own time. It's not the same thing as when I tweet something out. And then literally anybody with an internet connection.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is where I think the model of clubs versus stadiums becomes really useful. For a long time, everyone was really focused on the highly public aspects of the social web, but people are now starting to look at the semi-private web and these quieter spaces. The biggest parallel trends that I'm seeing right now, like one is seeing this formation of these creator-oriented communities that look like stadiums on the big public stage in say like Twitter or whatever. But then you see this other emergence of like group chats. And group chats have become this really, I mean, have always existed but have become a much bigger thing in recent years, partly because people are looking for relief from this highly, highly public space. And those map really well to clubs where you aren't trying to add a lot of users to your messenger app. You're trying to just keep it to like six of your closest friends. In most cases, we'd say that you're actively suppressing user growth, but contributor growth is high where you're totally down to chat with your friends and that little group.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mentioned this quote in the book, but Kevin Sister said in an interview in 2018, I believe, that social media is in this pre-Newtonian age where we know that it works, but we don't know how it works.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll say one more thing because I'm a big fan of the work of the sociologist Ronald Burt, and he talked about this concept of structural holes where you can have like clusters of activity and networks. And I came across this because when I used to work at Xerox Park, we used to talk a lot about the innovation that would happen when different fields would collide. And it's because you have these containers, these clubs, these stadiums of people who have strong ties. But then these really interesting things can happen with what are the weak ties and then the structural holes in the network. So if you map these out as like a universe of clusters, imagine what's possible when you can actually bridge some of those structural holes across communities.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, Jens Lee Strickler's comment about this, and I think basically a lot of people are observing that okay, we started with these really big social platforms that have grown to become really big. So the Facebooks and the Twitters and the Instagrams and YouTubes of the world, these are sort of like the biggest stages possible. And so the analogy to what's happening on the very public web right now is that everyone's still talking. It's just sort of like we're kind of moving to these little corners without fear of being attacked or jumped on somewhere where all context has otherwise collapsed.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Dark Forest comes from the idea of the Fermi paradox, I believe. And I'm a big fan of the three body problem trilogy. They have the wall facer. He's the one who figures this out. So I thought that was a super interesting analogy. Tell me a little bit more about your thoughts about the dark forest theory of the internet and how that applies here, what happens when people go off platform.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The only thing I would maybe add there to the dark forest concept or metaphor is this idea of hostility that we are all actually surrounded. There are all these other people out there. If we're sitting here wondering where are all the aliens, they're there, but the theory being that we're all trying to stay out of each other's way and not be detected because”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you mentioned the power of a platform. And you've been using this analogy of like cities and highways and connecting houses and connecting a small shop or a small village to a highway and what that does for people. What about the opposite when people go off the grid essentially and go outside our purview into these sort of private dark social places, whether it's WhatsApp groups or telegram groups or private stadiums, private groups. You mentioned in the book and I saw Yancey Strickler's tweet about this when he did it on Twitter. He's a former co-founder of CEO of Kickstarter. He draws the analogy of the Dark Forest. The reason that we can't communicate with aliens is because the world is so vast and the only way people can protect themselves is by being in this dark forest where there are these vast spaces of separation. So you're not in this vast”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There isn't sort of a meaningful way to measure someone's status or just have a clear picture of what someone does on the platform or what kind of developer they are. You can look at any one specific project and you can see how popular it is. You can see how many stars it has. But if you go to a developer's profile, it's not super clear what they're known for. You can technically follow a developer on GitHub, but it doesn't really mean anything, not at all the way that it does on Twitter or something like that. And so I think if you talk to well-known developers or developers that have these larger followings, they'll probably tell you that they keep their audience on Twitter or somewhere else. And GitHub serves a little bit more of this utility function, as Eugene said, where if a platform fails to provide this sort of status benefit, then it basically becomes a utility. They will continue to develop the social and status aspects of their platform. But right now, it really is much more of a utility, I think.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Eugene's thesis came out, thankfully, while I was writing my book, and it was very helpful because I was like, oh, great, now I have more vocabulary to explain the things that I mean that I'd been struggling with. I think actually this framing of status economies helps explain some of the shortcomings of GitHub thus far because”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, you're saying that you have the distribution because your audience travels with you, and that's important currency because you don't have to start from scratch every time. That does go to your other point as well, that the reputation is the key in the currency there. And that's where, you know, status, and you talk about this in your book in Eugene Way's thesis about status as a service comes in”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whereas, like platforms have this very important role that they play for creators, where if you want to do something new, you have an audience that you're building on there that you can use to seed whatever your new idea is. Platforms make it so much easier than you could have in the past. I mean, this is also, so I work at SubSec and this is also why I and everyone that I work with believe really strongly in the power of an email list because an email list is something that you own. And if you want to do something new with it, if you want to do something totally different.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think this kind of comes back to the value of platforms and they're a distribution power. So, I mean, in theory in the past, without having a platform, which is essentially just a stage for creators that is always going to exist is always there for the creator. Without that, if you wanted to go off and like start something new somewhere else, it's really, really hard because how are you going to direct anyone to your new thing all the way over there? It's like building a house but not building a road to the house”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This goes back to the phrase and something you said in your book, and that sort of theme for me, you can be transactional, but be in a very high sustained relationship because it's a repeated game, which is what subscription is. I think that's super fascinating. So what do you think the implications are then for people who change clubs? They go to a different, they create a new stadium. How is this new passion economy model evolved?”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, this is, I think, a giant red arrow pointing at why subscription models are going to only become more and more interesting in the very near future because they do take into account this need for ongoing development, their ongoing costs associated, and you have to earn that, as you said, over time. And so they're capable of sort of capturing both your existing value, the value that you have accrued thus far, and also speaking towards the future value that you might create because when you subscribe to someone or someone's thing, you're saying, like, I expect there is going to be more stuff being created in the future.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is literally one of my favorite parts of your book because it reminds me of the theses that we've talked about at our firm too around the passion economy. Here the artifact is code, but it can be any activity that's being coordinated, quite frankly, in your framework of your book, which is why I really believe, again, that this book is applicable to everybody. Open source is almost a misnomer because people think a means code and it really means everything. It's like any kind of creation and consumption, frankly. But what you're really saying is a maintainer is not just a coder, it's a creator, and they're maintaining their content in this world or whatever they're creating, which I think is incredibly powerful. And what's really powerful about that is then you think about sort of the related business models for that. Like when I think of the example of what subscription and SaaS software as a service did for the world of on-prem software and how people used to sell software and you had like the suited person do this big multi-million dollar deal install, never see them again. SaaS changed the game forever.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can have that moment, but then you have to continue creating things, otherwise people are going to stop paying attention to you, much like writing code. It's not enough to just sort of like publish it once and be like, I'm done. Like, I'm never going to touch this thing again. If you are trying to build this reputation over time, and some people will say, I had one viral video on TikTok and that's it. Like, I'm never doing anything else again. But if you are trying to be like a TikTok creator, you're going to have to start making more hits over time. And so your reputation is itself this thing that requires maintenance in order to stay relevant.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is why from the beginning, the ability to fork code or basically copy the exact repository somewhere else has become, it was like a very important part of it early on to say like someone can always take the copy of this code and make their own version of it somewhere else. Unfortunately, this comes back to this dependency issue today where, yes, in theory you can fork a project. And in practice, there might be a lot of other things, other software libraries, other pieces of software that are pointing to that specific project. And so if you fork it, you now have to somehow convince all those projects to start pointing to your new project. And so it is this challenge in open source where sometimes like a maintainer disappears and is nowhere to be found, but they still need to keep doing things to the code and to the project. Forking is not always an answer, an easy answer to that. It's still about telling everyone like, hey, come over here, use this. And that's actually why I think this concept of maintenance that is maybe easier to see in software actually really applies.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you're basically describing software as more of a living breathing organism, actually, in that context. You either want to evolve it and keep it going and generationally, you can evolve into something else and have offspring, et cetera. But it's a different thing than when you just have an abandoned site or an abandoned farm somewhere.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Intrinsic motivation really only takes you so far. And so if something happens where they actually need some changes to be made or need updates to be made to the project and the maintainer is nowhere in sight and nobody else has the ability to make commits or contribute to the project, this actually can create real problems for software.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the world didn't actually like break and shut down. If a maintainer has a project that is wildly popular and they're just sort of like over it and they disappear and this does happen often, that code is still, if it's popular, is being used by a bunch of other people and like code changes over time. It does need upkeep and maintenance. Intrinsic motivation helps a lot with on the creation side of things in the very beginning. If something becomes really popular, then you start getting these more extrinsic rewards like reputational benefits or status or whatever. A lot of that stuff is sort of front-loaded. And so if you're talking about maintaining a software project into perpetuity, after a while, you're already known as the creator of that thing. There's not really any additional benefit, but you still need to keep maintaining. And in fact, sometimes those maintenance costs get even higher over time. And so that's why I think it helps make the case for we need to find other reasons to keep people wanting to maintain stuff or make it easy for them to step down because”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is where software gets really interesting. And I think different from most other forms of creation because if someone creates an Instagram account that gets really, really popular and everyone's following it and then eventually suddenly this person goes dark and we never get another post of them. A lot of people will be sad about it. People might create like spinoff accounts and tribute to that original account, whatever.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That this developer works on, but they work on this ecosystem more generally. And so maybe similarly, the way that a writer might have started with one type of newsletter and then they joined forces with another one. And then suddenly we're sort of supporting this entire bundle of people that are working on a similar theme. You can imagine that happening with open source developers where they're no longer just tied to like one specific project, but it's like, I support your development work more generally. One of the more obvious examples I guess I could point to is. Created like thousands of mostly NPM related projects. But he's sort of like his own mysterious entity. It's not really about any one specific thing that he does. He's just like a very generative person. And he is supported through sponsorships.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, when we think about who is a contributor to that project, like, yes, you could look at who has actually made contributions to some specific sub-project, but you could also say, well, who's contributing to like React more generally? And so taking like Webpack or something that is a sub project that a React developer might expect to use, someone might have never contributed to Webpack before, but if they're well known as a developer in some other part of the React ecosystem, then they already have a little bit of currency and a little bit of reputation if they were to try to come in and open a pull request or make a contribution. And so I don't know exactly what the analogies are between that and sort of like subscription bundling or what that can look like, but one thing might just be that when we think about what would it look like to have more subscription type support for open source developers, which GitHub sponsors, OpenCollective, there are examples of this already, we might think a little bit more about, well, it's not just this one project.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I guess there is a version of that that happens in open source, which is you have this broader language ecosystem. I'll keep coming back to JavaScript as the best extreme to demonstrate this. And we can drill even further into JavaScript, let's say like the React ecosystem. And within React, there are a bunch of associated projects that React developer might use”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is very similar. If a creator were to treat every single fan that they met or every single person in their audience as someone that they're going to develop a deep and long lasting relationship, that's just exhausting. It's completely impossible. But if they say, okay, like, we are going to just meet this one time, like how can I make sure that this person feels fulfilled or whatever? And I manage this without giving too much of myself. And so, yeah, these interactions are more ephemeral and we can sort of design around that where like here are a bunch of like self-serve resources or it can encourage users to help each other instead of always turning to the creator for help. And so all these other sort of like supporting satellite communities can thrive and flourish on their own without needing an involvement from the creator.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually think like parasocial is a great way to just describe what kinds of communities these stadiums essentially are, which basically just means one-sided communities where one side of the audience has a deeper, more perceived intimate relationship with the creator than the creator does to them.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so they are coming in saying they're looking for a community that they want to be a part of and they want to help out. So, like, one behavior you might see that's different about an active contributor versus a casual one is someone coming in and like answering someone else's question instead of opening an issue saying fix my thing is like two very different kinds of behavior, right? Like one, you're trying to help someone else and one, you're asking for help. Like, I want to get something out of this. I want to get my contribution merged. I have a question that I need answered, whatever they're coming in with some sort of personal interest.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Drive by contributors, casual contributors. And so these are the people that are not coming in with pro social attitude. One thing I did find in my research is that folks that come in as these more active contributors making substantial contributions, a lot of them do come in displaying pro-social attitudes from the beginning.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Believe this, yeah. And so, like, they're having these terms that have existed in open source for a while. The idea of, say, like a casual contributor to distinguish between someone who's kind of dropping in and making one contribution versus someone who's a more active or present community member.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. To pull on a couple of other threads there, does this mean that these relationships even have to be persistent? I want to hear your thoughts on that because we talk about these very stable federations that have been around for decades. But one thing that I find very appealing and might be a bug to you, but I think as a feature, is that some of these things seem like they don't have to be persistent and can maybe be very ephemeral when you have that kind of small modular setup.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About the relationship between that creator and their audience, and like, how do I interface with my audience? How do I make them feel heard? How do I utilize people that might be willing to help or pitch in? So there was a lot of just like different kinds of strategies they can think about around like how do I, given my limited amount of attention, like how do we make sure that stuff continues to get done?”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ones that are probably most interesting to talk about today are the difference between clubs which have high contributor growth and low user growth and stadiums which have high user growth and low contributor growth. And so one of the things that previous online community literature focuses a lot on and especially also in open source are governance processes. Governance is probably more useful and important to talk about in the context of larger contributor communities because these are coordination problems, right? Like you have multiple members with a stake in the community who are all coming in with their own interests and you're looking to figure out like how do we all best work together. On the creator side, there's probably another version of these processes that need to be developed for stadiums that's not really about governance in the same way because you usually only have one or a couple people that are at the helm.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, there are absolutely different implications for how these different types of communities can and should think about organizing and how they think about growing and maintaining over time. The currency that I've settled on was focusing on a producer's attention as a limited resource. So we all talk about the attention economy, but the attention economy tends to refer to a consumer's limited attention. But we don't often talk about a producer's limited attention. So like a creator only has a finite amount of time as well if we're thinking about creators and not these like big distributed communities now the creator is kind of like on their own and their attention is not going to scale by themselves the first line that I would draw is between clubs and federations which are dealing with an abundance of attention because they can be high contributor growth and then stadiums that are dealing with dearth of attention I guess you could say because their contributor size is not growing significantly but their number of users is growing.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source