Chris Grams

Hi Asif--

On the second part of your statement, I'm not sure trust requires an absence of competition between collaborators.

My view? There is healthy competition and unhealthy competition. Sometimes, you'll see the best work coming out of projects where the contributors admire each other's work greatly and trust each other completely, yet also are driven by a strong desire to continue to impress each other with their individual work and ideas. I'd view this as healthy competition.

I'd agree with you that unhealthy competition can make it hard for open collaboration to be successful. I'd define unhealthy competition as a place where competition between contributors puts the project goals or purpose at risk vs. bringing them even closer to fruition. Where people compete at the expense of the project for individual gain.

Others may disagree with me. Thoughts?

I worked in the same office space with Rebecca at Red Hat for years. After that experience working in the open space, I would not have it any other way now.

In our office here at New Kind, we all sit in the same room, and it makes collaboration so much easier. If we need to, there are plenty of places to have a private conversation. As for noise, we have each invested in headphones, which are a lot cheaper than cube walls (and probably more effective at blocking noise).

As a bonus, the headphones can be used to listen to music, so I've found I'm keeping up with a lot more new music than I used to (Check out Local Natives, Broken Bells, and K'nann-- I've been listening to all three this morning as I browsed opensource.com).

Great article, Rebecca! Although I had no idea you weren't excited about the move when we made it:)