I love CouchDB, but I love the CouchDB community even more. I think we made the important decision to cultivate community right from the start. One of the key components in getting that right turns out to be the concept of a community gatekeeper, or steward. Someone to guide things back in the right direction when they get off-track. Someone to set an example. On the very few occasions someone has threatened the atmosphere on the lists and in the IRC channel, it has been nice to see people defend it with passion and with humility. When those people see how things work here, and how committed we are to keeping the grass green and not letting the project become mired by useless arguments and petty aggression, they either adjust or they leave.
Perhaps rather than producing wisdom, crowds encourage demagogy, regurgitation of home truths, and petty agression/pedantry unless they are encouraged to channel their energy in other directions. The contention is that they are never self-regulating (even if you give them the tools to do so), but require intervention and moderation to remain cohesive, productive communities.
Some interesting lessons in here for communities like HN/SO/Reddit/SD etc. which rely on crowd moderation and technical measures to try to guide a community. When dealing with a large enough community, that can break down as enough new members arrive to subsume the older culture completely in a small amount of time, and any technical measure you think of can be subverted by those willing to put in the time to do so. I think reddit's approach here of splitting the community up into smaller niche groups is really interesting, but IMO they arrived at it too late to save their community overall.
> I think reddit's approach here of splitting the community up into smaller niche groups is really interesting, but IMO they arrived at it too late to save their community overall.
But does the "community overall" need any saving?
The only things that keep reddit together as a nominal community are the crappy, spammy, default subreddits. If not for those subreddits, there would be little overlap between those who subscribe to CS subreddits and those who subscribe to cooking or literature or photography subreddits. In other words, all the good stuff is already highly fragmented, and reddit as a whole is a "community" only in the sense that it's under the same domain name.
I wouldn't miss much if reddit's "community overall" simply disintegrated in favor of even more fragmentation. What's wrong with having a million and five communities instead of one, if small and mid-sized communities in fact work better than large ones? Crowdsourcing might work best at a certain size and level of engagement, and the optimal size might be smaller than what your company's CFO wants you to believe. Yeah, it's not easy for an online business nowadays to make a neat profit unless they command a humongous "community". But the sweet thing about ASF is that they don't depend on having a lot of people see ads on their website, so they can optimize for effective community governance.
I personally think one of the benefits of reddit is the fact that you have access to essentially unlimited forums with the same identity. Oftentimes I am working/pondering something and I'd like to ask someone involved in that specific community a question. Without a "reddit-style" identity system (I know there are "security concerns", etc) it looks like I need another username and password for this niche phpbb forum. I think the reddit community lowers the barrier of online discussion to a degree that if I wanted to I'm one post away from hopping to another niche community to ask a question.
Yep, I like the idea of reddit-style online identity. It's almost effortless to create dozens of them, you can use them in any subreddit, and you don't even need an e-mail address to sign up.
Hopefully, if & when everyone starts using Persona, it will be nearly as simple to start using a random website as it is to join a random subreddit, and we will finally be able to stop being members of excessively large "communities" like reddit and fb.
I'm not sure you can separate out opinions easily from actions/decisions to spend money, and I don't find the idea of a rational market or a rational crowd at all persuasive. I'd say how they spend their money/resources has always been intimately connected with their opinions and (crucially) how they shared them. A few examples of the irrationality of crowds (NB I'm not saying they're always irrational, just that they're rarely rational/wise):
The expedition to Sicily by Athens in 413 BC
The run up in the Facebook stock price on IPO day
Widespread investments in failsafe CDOs pre the crash of 2008
If crowds have any wisdom, it dissipates pretty quickly when they gather and start sharing opinions.
FWIW, this was written in July of 2010 (2+ years ago) -- CouchDB is in a very different place now than it was then.
Reading the mailing lists of CouchDB, Redis, MongoDB and Cassandra are _very_ different experiences.
CouchDB's list reads like 10 or so of the same people discussing very high level efforts like documentation and Windows builds, developing the DB at a glacial pace -- including merging in changes from all the spin-off CouchDB efforts that all seem to be defunct now (e.g. BigCouch and the sharding code).
Tangentially, MongoDB/Redis/Cassandra mailing lists are NOTHING but "How do I..." questions, deployment questions, feature development questions, patch submissions, etc. (more-so Cassandra and MongoDB lists).
CouchDB to me has found this life that feels very academic to me which I think is a good thing in the long-term for the project. The principles are in no rush to get to features and have the motto "slow and consistent wins the race". I would be surprised at all if a few years go by and then CouchDB gets rediscovered suddenly as the panacea to everything (something akin to how Jetty suddenly became hot business in the Java server world after being mostly ignored for 10 years)
With the money behind Cassandra and Mongo it is probably not much of a surprise that there are much more new deployments going on and Redis has found a place somewhere between the two with what I would say is a Linus-like steward at the helm (props to Salvatorefor being everything that is right with open-source)
I wouldn't build a commercial product on CouchDB tomorrow, but I am eagerly waiting to see where it goes in the next year. It is wonderfully designed, but I'd like to see some of the nagging "table stakes" issues like replication failures fixed before caring about Feature XYZ and release 2.0
I'm not much of a CouchDB user (though I've played around with it a bit), but I would assume that at least part of the reason CouchDB's mailing list is so quiet is due to the rather public split of the community brought upon by the introduction of Couchbase.
Couchbase's forums have much the same sort of "How do I" questions you are talking about seeing on the other project's mailing lists.
When submitting links in future you should probably just stick with the original blog title, which in this case was "CouchDB retrospective" - a succinct and accurate representation of the actual topic being blogged about.
Yes but he talks about how it was the initial 3 contributors of Couch that created the culture that is so important to the quality of the community they currently have.
He's comparing the experience of being an open source project under ASF to that of being a free software advocate for gnu.org. This is when he mentions loving the community more than the code.
Exactly. Maybe we can learn from ASF in that regard and pull in some of the philosophy to opensource orgs such as the GNU, the Linux, the VideoLAN of the worlds; in my experience, you don't get much love as a newbie in most of those projects (in comparison)
Huh,I always thought of FSF/GNU as retirement homes for ancient projects more than code more than active coding. I have contributed code to ASF but I don't even know where to look for the repos and bug trackers. But grep and emacs feet occasional releases, so maybe my observation is of the effect, not the intent.
Perhaps rather than producing wisdom, crowds encourage demagogy, regurgitation of home truths, and petty agression/pedantry unless they are encouraged to channel their energy in other directions. The contention is that they are never self-regulating (even if you give them the tools to do so), but require intervention and moderation to remain cohesive, productive communities.
Some interesting lessons in here for communities like HN/SO/Reddit/SD etc. which rely on crowd moderation and technical measures to try to guide a community. When dealing with a large enough community, that can break down as enough new members arrive to subsume the older culture completely in a small amount of time, and any technical measure you think of can be subverted by those willing to put in the time to do so. I think reddit's approach here of splitting the community up into smaller niche groups is really interesting, but IMO they arrived at it too late to save their community overall.