Lessons of the Elders

Walking into work this morning, thinking about the vibrancy of the Twitter API developer ecosystem. Twitter has embraced (not necessarily intentionally) what I see to be open source’s two key aphorisms on successful community engagement (lightly paraphrased)

“Get people laid” – JWZ

“Leave lots of low hanging fruit” – Karl Fogel

People don’t go back often enough to the well of hard fought wisdom on community and online collaboration which the open source community developer. Believe me you do not want to spend the blood, sweat and tears to re-learn those lesson the hard way, they were fighting for a noble cause they believed in and it still sucked. Your micro-poking app ain’t all that.

Photo by curlyjazz