This topic is for posting great resources about Open Source Communities.
Tip: While it is easiest to drop Amazon Bookstore or Amazon Goodreads links to books, take a bit more time to find the original publisher or author’s webpage featuring the book. Help the small shops.
Kicking off with a great book + podcast I found via Doug Belshaw:
Book Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software
By Nadia Eghbal, Stripe Press, 256 pages
Over the last 20 years, open source software has undergone a significant shift—from providing an optimistic model for public collaboration to undergoing constant maintenance by the often unseen solo operators who write and publish the code that millions of users rely on every day. In Working in Public, Nadia Eghbal takes an inside look at modern open source software development, its evolution over the last two decades, and its ramifications for an internet reorienting itself around individual creators. By delineating the structure of open source projects, she explores, for the first time, the maintenance costs of production that software incurs for its developers. Drawing on hundreds of developer interviews and analyses of platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Twitch, and YouTube, Eghbal argues that examining who produces things on the internet, and not just what they produce, helps us understand the value of online content today.
The author is interviewed in this podcast:
Podcast Learning from Open Source Communities
Episode Summary
While “community” is a common buzzword in everything from web3 to SaaS, community has long played a key role in the modern open source movement. Author Nadia Asparouhova joins to talk about her book, Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software, from Stripe Press.
Episode Notes
What can we learn from the evolution of open source communities and how might they be applied to online communities and the creator economy today? Author Nadia Asparouhova joins host Sonal Choksi to talk about Asparouhova’s book, Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software, from Stripe Press.
They start with a a taxonomy for communities, and then dig into how open source has changed over time, which learnings from open source do and don’t apply to new communities online, how communities intersect with the growing desire for more “high-shared context” groups and spaces (including even podcasts and newsletters), and more.
The thesis of Philip Tchernavskij (who was master’s thesis student of Clemens Nylandsted Klokmose (member of Malleable Software chatroom) and later did a PhD with Michel Beaudouin-Lafon in Paris).
See also: Designing and Programming Malleable Software - Catalog - Malleable Systems Forum
The contemporary landscape of interactive software operates as a “designer-knows-best” model that gives users very few opportunities to change their software or to make different pieces of software work together as they see fit.
I introduce malleable software as a design vision that reconstructs the goals of tailorable systems with pluralism as a guiding value. Malleable software is made up of interface elements untangled from the closed worlds of apps, which can be developed by different authors and (re-)combined by end users.
Webstrates are mentioned in page 86 of the PDF in reference to the work of Clemens:
This website also serves a very inspirational list of publications.
Webstrates is followed by the chapter on “co-occurrences and entanglements” that has its conclusions on page 107. Fascinating paper.
Key Takeaways from Chapter 5
Our programming model based on entanglers makes interactions robust to run-time re-combination of UI elements, and enables ongoing adaptation of those interactions by programmers. Its key features each contribute to these qualities:
Option distributions targeted with selector queries enable programmers to additively extend components in the whole tree;
Co-occurrence descriptions enable programmers to create dynamic components representing temporary ensembles of system elements;
Entanglement templates enable programmers to attach interactions to co-occurrences; and
The co-occurrence engine creates and destroys interactions in the background as end users re-combine interface elements.
Compared to existing mechanisms for programming interactions, entanglers distribute the process of designing, constructing, enacting, and destroying interactions differently: programmers can design interactions without having to define the concrete elements participating in the interaction, enabling end users to control when and where interactions are in effect. This makes entanglers a suitable low-level idiom for building malleable software.
Ebook available as Open access free PDF…
Commons in Design explores the meaning and impact of commons—especially knowledge-based peer commons—and acts of commoning in design. It discusses networked, participatory, and open procedures based on the commons and commoning, testing models that negotiate the use of commons within design processes. In doing so, it critically engages with questions regarding designers’ positionings, everyday practices, self-understandings, ways of working, and approaches to education.
- What does commoning imply for the design discipline, and the role of designers?
- Focuses on dynamic, relational, social processes within design
- With many case studies from various parts of the globe