On growing community sites December 2
So, I’m reading Guy Steele’s paper Growing a Language for my Principles of Programming Languages class. It’s a fairly interesting paper on how to go about designing a programming language with growth in mind, and how to manage that growth.
But what really struck a chord with me was when he started talking about ESR’s “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”, as it relates to programming languages. He cites a quotes from Christopher Alexander:
Master plans have two additional unhealthy characteristics. To begin with, the existence of a master plan alienates the users… After all, the very existence of a master plan means, by definition, that the members of the community can have little impact on the future shape of their community, because most of the important decisions have already been made. In a sense, under a master plan people are living with a frozen future, able to affect only relatively trivial details. When people lose the sense of responsibility for the envrionemnt they live in, and realize that they are merely cogs in someone else’s machine, how can they feel any sense of identification with the community, or any sense of purpose there?
It occured to me that a lot of community based sites and projects, even if not being open source, are really operating largely in a bazaar fasion. Think of six apart, Technorati, and flickr for some examples. They all take a large amount of input from their users when deciding on a new direction. They also tend to come to the table with a pattern to fit user desires and needs in, not a master plan to cram down their users throats.
This is a huge paradigm shift for me. It means that the rules “release early, release often” apply not only to software you ship, but web tools as well. Get it out there as quickly as humanly possible, missing features and bugs be damned. And then let user interaction and feedback drive your efforts.
Also, Steele’s paper is pretty fun, because he only allows himself to use multisyllable words if he defines them first (using either single syllable words, or words he’s already defined).