I'll drink to that

Last month during the MVP Summit, I was able to meet Todd Ogasawara during the Open Source Software Lab tour. He’s got a great blog entry about his visit to the lab, and a great shot of some happy penguins feeling loved.

But what I want to comment on is his statement

As with nearly everything else in the world, it really is all about people.

It took a few days for this comment to really sink in. At first, I said, “yep, you definitely get it.” But then I started thinking, “what is this *it* that some people get and others don’t.” I’ve been living in the community space for a while, from accessibility, Visual Studio 2005 tip of the week, and now open/shared source. Last year sometime, someone asked me why portals like C9 are successful and other portals don’t make it. At the time, I didn’t have a good answer. But with this comment “it really is all about people” running through my head, I had that lightbulb moment. Fortunately, I was jogging at the time and not sleeping. I hate it when I put 2+2 together and wake up in the middle of the night, like how I figured out how to jibe a shoot (a sailing thing), go figure.

The most important thing I’ve learned from the past year of learning how to go open source is that a project must have a benevolent dictator, or to put it more mildly, you must have someone driving the project. You can’t just toss code over the wall and hope for the best. Same applies for almost any type of community project. You have to have a central leader or a central driver. There has to be someone, a human face on a project (if you will), that others can connect to and interact with, because at the end of the day, it’s all about people. It’s all about those individual interactions and connections, because the final results of any community project is really just the sum of those connections. And to me, it’s these individual connections that make projects worth doing, because at the end of the day, it’s all about people.

Going back and reading this sounds more like just common sense, but it was a cool revelation to me nonetheless. Now if I can just capitalize on this revelation somehow…  <grins>