Ferdinand Tönnies set out to develop concepts that could be used as analytic tools for understanding why and how the social world is organized in "Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft" (1887). What he couldn't realize is that he was giving us good tools for thinking about how open source software communities are organized and why there can be confusion and friction as project communities and non-profits mix.
The talk will present a working model for how to think about open source software projects (a small group of people sharing innovation outwards), building healthy communities around such projects by building on-ramps for growth (captuing innovation back into the project), and then using non-profits to manage the natural barriers to growth that occur around successful project communities when they reach a certain size. Instead of trying to be good engineers and design solutions to such problems, we will invoke a German 19th century sociologist to look at the cultural challenges when we gather a group of diverse talented people together then force the relationships to change.
