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

“Michael Rogers and I actually wrote a piece about this when I was at Wired. It was called The GitHub Revolution. And this was like in early 2013. And basically the What does that mean for how these groups organize and what does it mean for how they manage and how they collaborate?”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The person tweeting is not about like, oh, he wrote that amazing tweet six years ago that I often revisit. That's not really what it's all about. And so I think to sort of summarize this, I think the shift towards modularization also helps drive why we're seeing more interest in reputation-based and status-based.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you kind of come down to a world where things are a lot more modularized, suddenly the focus shifts from the code to the people who are behind it. Because now every piece of code is much smaller, more trivial. There are very well-known developers, especially in the world of JavaScript, where that really encourages a lot of this sort of style of development, there are very well-known developers who make hundreds or thousands of popular NPM modules, which are each their own separate project, but each one's very small. And so suddenly it kind of becomes more about the person behind it, a useful parallel here might be thinking about the impact of tweets versus blogs where a blog post is this like lengthier thing and a blog post kind of stands alone as, you know, beautiful piece of literature or whatever. But then like, you know, if you're really into using Twitter, like you might tweet like 100 things in a day and one tweet might go viral, but like you have so many more that come after that, right? And so it kind of just becomes like about.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People that are really focused on these sort of like ideological implications of open source or free software, if you talk to them, you'll find that, or I at least found, that a lot of them are really concerned about the liberation and protection and longevity of the code itself. Like freedom is not referring to any freedom of developers. It's referring to freedom of the code.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The crypto world, the community and the team here loves to talk about the composability of open source projects. Composability being the idea that you can take these building blocks. You mentioned Legos. And that's really important because people are combining, remixing, and reusing. And it's kind of a buzzword, but I use it on the podcast. I'm going to stop being ashamed of it, which is combinatorial innovation. And it's very primordial soup. Like you get all these ingredients, and then it leads to this combining and recombining and evolution and the Cambrian explosion. I'm just throwing a ton of buzzwords there. So that's why the modularity matters. So now can we talk for a minute about what it means from a project point of view when open source goes from big to this small kind of collectives of people that may come together, what are the implications of that?”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The code, you can actually say, hey, I'm going to grab lots of different components from different types of developers. I want this person's library and this other person's library and just fine-tune it to look exactly how you want. And as a result, it enabled a lot of new creation in open source.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So on the one end, you have very monolithic software where if you change one thing, it has a lot of implications for changing other things. Software projects that look like this tend to be a lot more thoughtful and deliberate and slow about what they actually want to accept as a contribution or changes that they want to make because the whole thing is tightly coupled but also sort of brittle in that way. And so it has just a very different implication for like how many contributions we actually accept, how much can we actually change things. What happened when open source became a little bit more modularized, which is probably best exemplified, as you said, in the story of NPM and JavaScript, is that now instead of having this tightly coupled code, you can imagine like a tower made out of Lego blocks where you can remove one of those blocks and like the rest of the tower still stands. So it completely just sort of changes how we think about a single piece of software and that like instead of having to think about the major implications of changes between different parts of”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You actually shared a great analogy in your book where it's like a Twitter user, like an early Twitter user before they become kind of famous or big. They're very good about responding to people. They're building their community. It's very peer-to-peer. And then there was a point where some of them become even more influential. And they're so overwhelmed by mentions and replies and questions that they can't even remotely respond to any of it, let alone little of it. So I thought that was a very useful analogy for thinking about that because one can also evolve over time. So you mentioned that there's this kind of increasing packages where people can kind of take things and combine them. And this really stood out to me because one of my absolute favorite themes when I think of sort of meta themes for innovation and how people change the world and how people change things is modularity. And I have this kind of joke of like modularize all the things. Let's talk about why that modularity matters. And the example that we both know is a modularity in the form of like the node package manager.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By some cute little town, and suddenly it changes the nature of the entire town because I mean, in some tourist towns, you could have more than half the population is actually tourists and not even local residents. I'm just going to completely close off and do my own thing or have to welcome everyone. And those are kind of the two extremes that I often hear about when they're trying to think about how do I manage this volume. And so what I'm sort of trying to suggest is there's something in the middle there where it's okay to make things and share them in public, but that doesn't mean that everyone has to participate. And that's a theme that I really try to push on in this book is that something being public does not mean that it has to be participatory.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Different languages having these package managers that made it really easy to find and discover and use lots of different libraries. And so now these projects are smaller. They have one developer at the helm, but they have 10x, 100x, 1000x, more users that are coming in. And so suddenly you go from having these clubs where everyone kind of knows each other. If you're using it, you're kind of expected that you will be contributing back if you need something instead of asking someone to do it for you. Suddenly you have like all these outsiders that are like flooding into a project and using it. At the same time, you also have some portion of those users who are now coming into the project and asking for things. And they don't have the same background that the core developers or creators or maintainers do. They're just sort of like asking for things and leaving. A useful analogy here might be thinking about a small town that was largely undiscovered, was not connected to a highway. And then once it became part of a highway system, then you suddenly have all these tourists who are now stopped.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It does have this broader application to what's happening to individual creators on all these different social platforms today. Most open source projects, we can probably say used to be clubs where just like not a lot of people were using open source in its earliest days, you kind of had this group of weird developers who just loved using it and maintaining it for their own purpose. And then eventually we kind of hit this point where open source became so popular that tons of people were kind of discovering all these projects and using the code. And I would attribute that in large part to the creation of a platform, GitHub, which kind of united all these projects together and made them discoverable in one place with much more standard way of contributing and discovering and just like thinking about what is open source. For a lot of people GitHub is basically synonymous with open source. Another useful parallel trend here is just that open source projects started becoming a lot smaller due to just platform effects of”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then the fourth model is stadiums, and this is the one I think is most interesting and most overlooked because it's kind of a newer phenomenon. And so this is a situation where you have one or maybe a couple of contributors, and then you making something for a very large audience of users. And so you can imagine someone standing in the middle of a stadium. There's this imbalance where in this case, the developer is fielding a lot of inbound requests, a lot of comments, issues, pull requests, just a lot of needs from their users, but there aren't that many people who are actually able to help. Contrast it to a federation where you imagine something like Linux is extremely widely used, but there's also a very mature and well-developed ecosystem of contributors to support it. A big part of this book is taking the time to stop and look a little bit more deeply at what is that giant audience of faceless users and are there interesting dynamics happening there that actually make this look more like”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And then toys, I sort of mentioned passing, and they're probably the least interesting thing to talk about. That's where you have both low user and low contributor growth. So that might just be like a personal project that I'm tinkering around. No one else is really looking at it. They're sort of waiting in the wings before they become one of the other types of communities.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, federations are like the really big open source projects we might be thinking of, like Linux or Wikipedia, where you have a lot of people who are contributing to the project and you have a lot of people that are using the project. But there are enough people that are working on the creation of that project that it does form its own sort of contributor community. By contrast, clubs have a lot of people who are participating in its creation, but they don't have as many people that are using it. And so a project that's kind of focused around a niche interest, the example I like to give is Astropy, which is a Python library for astrophysicists.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, everyone sort of has a maybe like general understanding of what community is. Like, oh, there's a bunch of members, and they're kind of organized around some common interest or a reason for spending time together. In that highest level definition of a community, there's an underlying assumption that like all members are sort of similar. And just the term members are like washes over the underlying dynamics between those different members. And so what I started by doing was saying, okay, there is a difference between at minimum and open source. People who are contributing to open source and people who are using open source. So I try to sort of separate out users and contributors and say, okay, in some open source projects or, as you said, really communities in general, some communities have high contributor growth and some communities have high user growth. And then there's sort of like different permutations of that.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. And she says something like the term open source doesn't mean anything any more than the term company does. It's like, yes, we kind of get what a company is, but there are so many different kinds of business models for different types of companies. And so similar with open source, saying something is open source tells you a little bit about how the code might be used, but it doesn't really say anything about how they're actually being made. Someone has to continue taking care of it.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I mean, I personally find the term kind of intimidating, and I don't know, it doesn't sound exciting when I say the term open source, but it really does just refer to the distribution side of code, the existence of open source licenses made it very easy for anyone to use and modify and republish someone else's code and put it in their own software. But it doesn't really say a whole lot about how open source is actually produced. And so I make this analogy in the book, which is actually an analogy I borrowed from my friend Devin.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Early on, I was just like, oh, I really hate this term, and I just wish we could come up with something else like public software or whatever. Oh, I love that. I love it too. Unfortunately, it's pretty hard to change terms that everyone else agrees on. I know this first.”
2022-08-11 · a16z Podcast · Learning from Open Source Communities · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source