updating a4 with new info from one of my project contacts
lj assignment 6 submission
Update jhartnell-assign1.md
Comments Thomas 11/6/2013

Since you joined Hypothes.is a while ago, you might want to discuss how you have progressively joined the community and what barriers (e.g. social,communication and logistics,skills) you have encountered at different epochs of your joining journey.
Comments Thomas 11/6/2013

Christine, Your approach is amazing. You combined your interest for the class with the need to immerse yourself in a new physical environment. And for that, you engage in the cyberworld. As a follow up other people might want to know how it has worked in the end and how the physical and the virtual worlds might have cross-nurtered ! Do you think you can integrate faster through online interaction? Why ?
Comments Thomas 11/6/2013

Christine, you pointed out a very important issue here when asking how many people contribute to the Wiki : obvsiouly there is a gap between the number of registered users and contributing ones. Doesn't it look weird that at the age of recording every digital information no one can precisely assess the size of a community ? You raise this point, but I bet it is relevant to any other open source project.

Along these lines you pointed out that an implicit measure of activity is by the production itself (e.g. editorial contributions). Could you tell a little more on that ?
Comments Thomas 11/6/2013

Christine, your point on whether a contribution, which might not been long lasting ( due to change by others or obsolescence I guess) is worth after all. Two reactions on this :

- basically in open collaboration you face constantly the risk that things will change and this is perceived as desirable, but I share your perspective that it might be considered as a loss of time rather ex-ante than ex-post. Has your perception evolved on this over the last weeks ?

- Your point rather directs to the "game rules" and what people agree to keep or modify from others' contributions. This is related to governance and institutions and how people can align their incentives or at least respect the others. Maybe you address this point in the next assignment but I haven't read it yet. If not, I strongly encourage you to deepen a bit your point, maybe by discussion what institutions or governance structures might be most suited to put order in the wiki in the future while keeping contributors onboard (this is a though question but it would be great if you could give your insight on this if you can)
Comments Thomas 11/6/2013

Some thoughts : 

- I see your idea on "collective benevolent dictatorship" , but a collective weekly meeting where decisions are taken is not really a dictatorship, unless one single person there also takes decisions, which is pretty much unlikely
- Maybe no one had answered your question on governance simply because they have no idea about it. Is that plausible?
Comments Thomas 11/6/2013

Thanks for your thoughts Peter! I wonder if you also considered the practical issues associated with going open source : would contributors join a Free Law Project that would not be open ? Also at the current stage of development, do you think the project would survive one or both founder stepping down the project ? There is a difference between the aim and the reality. I would be glad to have your thoughts on that too.
Comments Thomas 11/6/2013

Very interesting thoughts in the last paragraph. Can you explain further why you don't want to let the down Brain and Michael ? self-interest? social reciprocity ?
Comments Thomas 11/6/2013

How do you expect the project to (self-)organize the day it will gain more attention with a much larger circle of developers and possibly lawyers as users ? Do you already get feed-back from users and do you integrate it in the project and how do you communicate on the issues ?
minor fix
Merge pull request #133 from fchasen/master

Updated Markdown links
Comments Thomas 11/6/2013

Excellent report of a coalescence process in open source development! Can you tell more on incentives and emotional drivers that have eased the merge ?

As a project founder, how do you manage newbies ?
Comments Thomas 11/6/2013

Rodrigo, this license issue is very interesting ! However, I don't understand the tension between advancing technology and choosing the most restrictive Affero GPL license ?
Comments Thomas 11/6/2013

This looks great !

Minor points : 

- I have really hard time understanding your last sentence => might require some rephrasing. What do you mean exactly by formal ?

- Your experience is interesting also because you could establish face2face communication. Can you compare your online and offline experiences with the same community ?
Comments Thomas 11/6/2013

Do you see any collision between ideology and project long-term survivability ? Take for instance the analogy between open source licenses and their survival over time : most restrictive licenses (e.g. GPL) tend to be replaced by more "pragmatic" (i.e. open) licenses such as Apache.
Comments Thomas 11/6/2013

You express some fun in participating to the project. How do you balance this fun with the requirements of the class as well as other commitments ? How much your intrinsic motivation is crowded out by mundane daily tasks ?
Comments Thomas 11/6/2013

You made an excellent point that the organization/governance will have to evolve in the future. It would be great if you could write down your thoughts more precisely of how the governance shall evolve as the project grows, starting from the word "open" example you mentioned. Should the project be in your opinion more participative ? Do you think that scaling up make participative processes easier ?
Comments Thomas 11/6/2013

I reviewed your assignment 1 and I realized that since you have experienced problems joining Chromium, it might make it a little more difficult to share a great (positive) experience. I think you should not shy away from telling your negative experience and to explain why it has not worked. Unless you want to censor yourself, I would really recommend that you take a critical approach towards the Chromium community (and among other things its governance structure) to explain your problems. You might also want to comment honestly on what might have gone wrong your side too.

This will surely help a lot of community joiners understand in the future why joining went wrong. At least, they won't feel alone => that's also community building ;)