On Sunday, I drove to Harrisburg to meet up with Ryan Duff at the Central Pennsylvania Open Source Convention. This was their first event, covering all sorts of interesting Open Source topics.

Of the six sessions I attended - a packed day - only two were really not of too much interest to me. That's a pretty good ratio in general, and I suppose that had I chosen to go to other sessions during those time slots instead, I would have had more interest.

The open source virtualization session was good, although I had learned a lot of that information already from a similar session at OLF. Still, there was much better coverage of history and hands-on console configuration of client domains. It would be nice to see someone set up a Xen host and dom0 fully.

The jQuery session was a bit elementary for me, but quite entertaining. There were a couple of things I learned, as with anything so large and flexible as jQuery there's bound to be something. The presenter was a lot of fun, and I hope to adopt some of his style when doing my own.

The session on scalable system administration was a good one. Leading off with taking the wifi router down remotely, the session leader presented a method for keeping all of your servers configured identically so that maintenance is a cinch. He recommended tools that I'll have to check out.

Getting involved in an open source project was the topic of the next session I attended. The session was chock full of information and recommendations, but extraordinarily light on real-world examples. I had to muster restraint to keep from citing examples of my own. A lot of good information was conveyed here, and I'm hoping this presenter puts his slides online.

The lunch food was brought in, paid for by a sponsor, and was pretty good. As a matter of fact, there were snacks and drinks pretty much all day. There were also door prizes awarded after every session, of which I won one: a copy of O'Reilly's Apache Cookbook.

The lacking things in this event were mentions of blogging and social media. I think social media is the new SEO -- a fact of life now way overhyped. I'm glad not to have been inundated by it at this open source convention.

Lunch could have been shorter (1.5 hours?) to allow more time between sessions. Also, I've been waiting for some event to put on a kind of organized mixer function to get attendees out of their little cliques and meeting each other. It wasn't surprising to find that omitted here, either.

The event was on the small side for things I've attended recently, only around 100 attendees. It was at another ITT Tech, which is a classroom-style building. It's difficult to crap more people into such a venue. Nonetheless, it was comfortable for the number of attendees.

If they run another one next year, I'll definitely attend again. It was certainly worth my time, only a short hour's drive, and the organizers did a good job putting on speakers with compelling presentations.

Alex and I have been going back and forth in comments over the areas of our interest that overlap. In his recent post, he asks, "how long can organic communities self-moderate?"

I admit that I haven't read the Starfish and the Spider, although I did just one-click it into my Kindle, so it's doomed to suffer my analysis. Nevertheless, I had some comments about how leaderless organizations can thrive, particularly in open source communities, of which I happen to be a part of a couple.

Obviously, one of my passions is working with Habari and the people that have come together around that common goal. When we started, there were just four of us, each with various levels of ability and availability. I think you can pretty well call that "leaderless", since we all worked in tandem, and any small change any one person made was easily detected and reviewed by the other three. But as the project has grown, I think there is some kind of tragic irony in that the size of the operation inevitably leads toward a need for at least an informal management structure.

Of course, any of the Habari folks reading would rightfully start screaming at my last statement. The cornerstone of our philosophy is that no animal is more equal than any other. Still, without naming myself supreme ruler of the project, I think there remains a practical aspect to several individuals having responsibility for making things work and controlling the direction development takes.

What I've always hoped with Habari is that the community would fracture, but in a good way, and that the different aspects of the system would be able to communicate with each other in a way that is productive for the whole. An example of this came up today regarding our published documentation.

We've been using TiddlyWiki for our distributed documentation - the manual - which is supplied with the source of the software, separate from the online wiki. Basically, the large online docs have been distilled into a neat little dynamic wiki manual that comes with the software. A few folks who are less technically inclined decided to make documentation their project, and upon reviewing what we had, concluded that the manual was nice but not internally consistent, because it simply pulls parts of the larger wiki. As a result, they have started rewriting the manual as a single cogent file.

Following pointing out this effort on IRC today, I was asked by the person who originally suggested TiddlyWiki for the manual as to why we were dropping TiddlyWiki. My response to him was basically that some folks had decided to own it, and what they were doing was probably better for the project in the long run, and how could I not support that? And I think he agreed with my reasoning. But also, a personal reason - one that might or might not have been implied - was that I didn't really want to have anything to do with the manual.

I long ago realized that I simply can't keep the whole project in my mental scope any more. Back when it was just four guys, I could keep track of every change. Now there are 25 PMC members, and many, many more contributors and users that supply insights and patches with a regular flow. I can't possibly track it all in a way that makes my own contributions worthwhile. So I've decided that if people come along that want to manage a part of the project, they present their ideas well, show some vision I can get behind, and lead other people to follow them there -- I am behind that effort. And those are the people we're looking to promote to the PMC as leaders anyway.

To that end, we've been working out a way of handling when splinter groups want to take on specific tasks like these. We call them "working groups". The concept may be familiar. We started out with some formal guidelines that explain how the groups must be formed and to whom they report, and many of these processes are followed and documented, but personally I think that even as informal groups these units work fine.

The key feature is that there is always reporting back to the main group. They make plans and present them, and the main group has the opportunity to provide more insight, to join, or to dissent. Although the working groups may go off on their own to implement the plan, they don't do everything in secret or behind a gate. Anyone has the ability to shift in or out of a working group as his interest dictates.

This has been working well for documentation as well as code. Some of our larger initiatives have started out as branches created by others who want to work on a specific task together. The larger group provides some oversight, but the working group is mostly autonomous until the code is submitted for merging. Then others review the code as necessary.

I suppose it's easy to quantify the project in terms of output, but longevity has a lot to do with the social formula too.

Completely separate from the users of WordPress, the community of developers for WordPress used to spend quite a lot of time talking on IRC. At some point, because this relationship was not encouraged, the heart of the system died. Now on the WordPress IRC channel, some developers might idle, but it's mostly a desolate place where people come to ask questions that echo into the oblivion, unanswered.

I assume that the social structure for WordPress has moved elsewhere. Perhaps it's within Automattic itself, or in the halls of the many competent WordPress consulting companies that have formed. But it has changed over time.

I'm hoping that we've made some decisions early on that will affect how Habari lives and works long-term. We may individually have plans for making commercial moves with Habari in the future - not Habari itself but services around it - but the social network (not Facebook, but a network of real people) we're trying to build will hopefully stay strong until the project is obsolete.

Being a worldwide community, we rely on leaders even in different timezones. When I sleep someone is leading the community. Even when I'm around, I'm not always "present", and other people fill in. Part of that is related to how the project gives people more control, more involvement. Part is that the people actually care to do it. When the people who are involved don't care any more, they should move on. I hope that we can keep adding people who care enough to keep things going as much as I do.

I'm not really sure that answers any specific questions, but it's how things are, and how we've managed to survive this long, and hopefully what will keep us moving.

I've just finished a science fiction book by Vernor Vinge called "A Deepness in the Sky", and one of the themes of the book is technological collapse; how civilizations can only live so long and evolve so technically before they implode. The trading race that travels and trades between these civilizations sees everything and deals with everyone. Along the way, they record this knowledge and the knowledge makes them great and lasting. By adhering to a set of social rules and general beliefs, they are able to outlast their customer civilizations. It reminds me quite a lot of what I think organic communities need to survive, not so much that a strict process is followed, but that the entire race of people shares a belief that powers their way of life.

There has been a good deal of tumult over a recent TechCrunch post that Mullenweg characterizes as a "hatchet job". There are some crazy folks trolling the comments over there, and although there are many points there I find on either side of the validity line both in the comments and the post itself, I do have my own perspective.

Changing Way brings up an interesting point about anyone being able to improve WordPress' spam prevention. After all, WordPress is GPL-licensed, and so anyone can take the source and improve it and re-release it. Skippy has offered a good argument for why a fork of WordPress would have difficulty materializing. But people seem convinced that anyone can submit code changes to the core software to have them included. While this may be generally possible, I think it's more difficult for the common person than you would imagine, and I think it is an unrealistic belief for this specific feature.

Consider that Automattic runs Akismet, a hosted spam prevention service. Packaged with WordPress is a plugin that uses Akismet, which also requires a WordPress.com API key. If you are a pro blogger (which is one reason why most people don't lend some credence to this) then the service that prevents spam is a commercial service, from which Automattic profits. You can also choose not to use the plugin if you aren't worried about spam or have chosen some other route or protection. Where's the bad here?

Well, what do you think the likelihood is that Automattic - who controls what code is added to WordPress - would bundle any other service's anti-spam plugin with WordPress? Although it's not released yet, I wonder about the likelihood of having another commercial spam prevention plugin included with WordPress.

Wait. Weren't any of these 71 others good enough to include? No, the only one good enough is the one that Automattic wrote and is (depending on your comment volume) making money from.

I hesitate to bring up comparisons of how this sounds suspiciously like when Microsoft bundled their browser for free with their operating system and put Netscape out of the browser sales business, because there are just enough differences to draw attention away from the argument I've made above. But doesn't this smack of something that you'd otherwise see an enormous Slashdot thread about? If WordPress wasn't the darling of the blog world, but perhaps an evil corporate machine?

I wrote that last line somewhat off the cuff, but this perception is interesting to me. The more intriguing evil characters in literature don't always think that they are doing wrong. They often believe that they are acting in everyone's best interests. I get that impression a lot from what comes down from Automattic. They'll bundle their commercial product with this open source software because people really want it. But they don't seem to see the danger on that path. Advocates of open source who have obvious success from packaging access to their closed-source service for free with the product of many others' work. It's like those annoying little icons that off-the-shelf PCs have for AOL and MSN and 50 other paid services on their desktops. I digress...

Mark goes into great depth about the wonders of Akismet and comparisons between it and other solutions. I agree on many points, specifically about how there would need to be many solutions to the spam problem if there was no centralized solution. I don't think anyone has said that Akismet works poorly or that it's not needed. Nonetheless, that there's something off about having a commercial product tied to a supposedly community-driven project. I think Mark's comments on having an alternative "blog-level" solution hint that he might agree. But his success at committing such a solution itself (however improbable it is to materialize) holds little hope if history is to be believed.

I've said in other places that I only really see one solution that would satisfy me, and it's certainly not palatable to Automattic. That would be if Automattic released the keys to the open source project to the community and let them decide what's best. If the community decided that Akismet was kosher, so be it. At least then you'd know that the decision wasn't a commercial one inflicted (whether with good intent) on unsuspecting open source.

Now I've filled a good sized post only scratching the surface of the issues arising from the TechCrunch article. Oddly enough, this is something I didn't even really want to talk about. Seriously, don't we all have better things to do? Still, it has been interesting to see the whole thing play out, and I wonder what other repercussions there might be besides the change to the default blogroll, especially as people become more aware of these cracks in WordPress' otherwise apparently flawless porcelain façade.