In their recent book, Wikinomics, D. Tapscott and A. Williams write about
peer production:
?In its purest form, it is a way of producing goods and services that
relies entirely on self-organizing, egalitarian communities of individuals
who come together voluntarily to produce a shared outcome. In reality,
peer production mixes elements of hierarchy and self-organization ? i.e.,
the most skilled and experienced members of the community provide
leadership and help integrate contributions from the community.
In many peer production communities, productive activities are voluntary
and nonmonetary? (page 67)
The above definition maybe the gold standard of open collaborative
production community, achieved by elite few initiatives (likes of LUNIX
and Apache). At the same time, having over 90% of contributors from IBM
and handful of its business partners is not open peer production (i.e. you
don?t have 20 independent contributors) by any standard. After two years,
maybe if another independent vendor (e.g. Borland, Sun, HP, Compuware) or
hundreds of independent developers contributed some code, I would have
agreed with you. But we have very different standard for qualification of
a community as truly open and collaborative.
What motivated me in posting my previous note were the last few weeks?
discussions on ?community outreach? (which is nothing more than
promotion). You are even putting ?community outreach? at a higher priority
than fixing bugs (wow!). Genuine open peer production projects don?t need
so much recruitment activities.
I totally disagree with your statement that agile processes are not
complete. I personally have been involved in many development projects
which successfully utilized different agile processes. Also I have come
across many developers with the same experience. Eclipse (the platform
that you are based on) was developed using Eclipse Way. This is a
methodology developed by practitioners in the trenches out of real needs
and is battle tested, Rather than, conceived by generals faraway from the
combat zone. There are many other examples of amazing methodologies
developed and utilized by development teams. We don?t need another new
methodology create by high-priests of methodology to prove their divinity
(or for content of their next book).
I find your statement that, EPF is addressing the mixing and matching
different agile methodologies, arrogant. There are plenty of more
qualified grassroots agile communities who can address this if there is
truly a need for it. The idea of using an arcane meta-model created by an
out-dated organization (OMG) to mix and match agile methodologies is
bizarre.
EPF looks to me like a creative marketing strategy by IBM (possibly
version 2.0 of which is called ?Commercial Open Source?), not a genuine
peer production community. There is nothing wrong with that. But let?s not
fool ourselves. Also such miss representation raises some ethical concerns.
Finally, my request to you (as IBM representative) is to open source RUP
and make it available in a wiki form. I bet my Playstation 3 that, it
would be more useful to the community than all of the last 2 years?
effort. Let self-organizing communities form around this base content.
Each community can then trim and mash up this content in ways we never
imagined.
?The ability to continue to produce art without permission from the
latter-day aristocracy of creativity is central to both cultural and
economic progress?. So much of what makes a free society and economy
healthy and vibrant is that we have limited the control points in a way
that permits creation and experimentation in a largely anarchistic
fashion.?
(Wikinomics, page 141)