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DURHAM
Greg DeKoenigsberg is the Vice President of Community for Ansible, where he leads the company's relationship with the broader open source community. Greg brings to Ansible over a decade of open source product and community leadership, with the majority of this time spent building and leading communities for open source leader Red Hat. While at Red Hat, Greg served in various community leadership roles, including senior community architect, leader of the Fedora project, chair of the first Fedora Project Board, and Red Hat community liaison with the One Laptop Per Child project. More recently, Greg led community and product efforts for open source cloud pioneer Eucalyptus Systems.
Authored Comments
Yeah, Bradley Kuhn, former executive director of the Free Software Foundation, co-founder of the Software Freedom Law Center and president of the Software Freedom Conservancy, get a clue! You clearly have no idea what you're talking about!
Really?
Do I think that Red Hat should give up on patents? No, I don't. I think that Red Hat needs to continue to file defensive patents. I also believe that the Red Hat Patent Promise is a sufficient hedge against bad behavior, so long as we don't decide to change that policy.
But it's a position about which reasonable people may disagree, and if anyone has earned the right to express his informed opinion, it's Bradley Freaking Kuhn. Sheesh.
I think of open source communities as software-domain specific examples of "communities of practice" -- a term coined by sociologist Etienne Wenger, whom I consider to be a sort of undiscovered patron saint of community development. His work was definitely influential in the writing of The Open Source Way (https://www.theopensourceway.org/).
There's no way to reclaim the word "community", of course. We can only work to define it in specific contexts.
The Wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_of_practice) is actually a great summary, and well-annotated. I wonder if Wenger wrote it himself. :)