Shane is founder of Punderthings℠ LLC consultancy, helping organizations find better ways to engage with the critical open source projects that power modern technology and business. He blogs and tweets about open source governance and trademark issues, and has spoken at major technology conferences like ApacheCon, OSCON, All Things Open, Community Leadership Summit, and Ignite.
Shane Curcuru serves as VP Brand Management for the ASF, wrote the trademark and branding policies that cover all 200+ Apache® projects, and assists projects with defining and policing their trademarks, as well as negotiating agreements with various software vendors using Apache software brands. Shane is serving a seventh term as an elected Director of the ASF, providing governance oversight, community mentoring, and fiscal review for all Apache projects.
Otherwise, Shane is: a father and husband, a BMW driver and punny guy. Oh, and we have cats! Follow @ShaneCurcuru and read about open source communities and see my FOSS Foundation directory.
Authored Comments
Bonus ProTip to the excellent list here:
- FOSS communities, especially 501C3 organizations, have different goals than you do - and probably different goals than most of your other clients. Ignore the community's ethos at your peril.
This is a good reminder that "merit" often has widely different connotations for different groups. Not just what counts towards merit - sales numbers, collaboration activities, etc. - but who and how merit should be measured.
The ASF calls itself a meritocracy, but both given the Apache Way and the FOSS and volunteer nature of the projects it hosts, that's often misunderstood. FOSS merit is often a wholly different concept and practice than it is in commercial companies.
At Apache, "merit" is defined as contributing useful work that furthers the project's goals. The decision process for recognizing merit is fairly permissive: as long as a new contribution passes the tests, it's easier to get new code into a project - even if it's not a widely used functionality - than to block a contribution. At Apache, there are no quarterly earnings calls - work happens at the pace of the volunteers who do it, and as long as new work improves the product in any form, then it's merit-worthy.
Recognition of merit in FOSS projects is by granting more rights: being voted as a committer (able to write to the repository) and a PMC member (voting on releases and new committers). So in FOSS, recognition of merit gives you more abilities to change the project direction - but not more pay or other recognition.
There are great concepts in this article, but many feel like they're still focused on the corporate world, not as much the true non-profit FOSS project world. But I agree it's important to remember there's lots to teach about the models here.
Thanks!