There’s an assumption that the contributors to open source projects are all developers with deep technical knowledge and there’s no place for people who are just smart and experienced users of the products. But I’m not one of those people. In fact, I’ve had considerable success with very deliberately inviting users into the open source process, even requiring their participation before we move forward.
One of the best examples of this was the podcasting community started in late 2000 by myself and Adam Curry. Adam is not a developer, he’s what I would call an inspired user with great courage. He showed me his idea for what eventually became podcasting by hacking my software product Frontier. That caught my attention. His code was awful, could never be maintained, had egregious flaws in it, but it worked. It showed the idea he was trying to convey and from there, I, an experienced developer was quickly able to do it “for real” and within a couple of months in early 2001, we had the basic technology written and proven to work. Then the next step, which took much longer, was to recruit people to actually create for this new medium that now existed at a technical level.
That didn’t happen until the fall of 2004, after I had done a few cross-country road trips podcasting every freaking day, sometimes while driving through the plains of Saskatchewan or on I-5 in Oregon, and podcasted the DNC in Boston earlier that summer, had shown people that anyone could do this because I was as inept at audio production as Adam was at writing code. Previously we had tried to seed the art with Chris Lydon’s podcast series, which had a professional feel to it because Chris was a professional radio person, having defined what I call the NPR voice. That was useful in showing NPR itself the value of podcasting, and they were eventually a very important part of the bootstrap.
By the fall of 2004 we had a small excited community of developers and users, and we coined this slogan — users and developers party together. And it worked. As you can see now podcasting is a thriving open market, open because we established standards early on that were easy to understand and guaranteed users choice in tools to create and listen to podcasts.
I believe we’re in a similar place now with FeedLand. RSS has been largely dormant for years, but it still works, and it is imho the answer to a lot of the questions we’re asking about how social media goes forward from the collapse of Twitter and Facebook’s dominance. This will be possible because FeedLand is organized around the concept of a “news product” — a way for developers who have minimal technical skills to create great news experiences for people who have not yet developed those skills. This model has a long history in the software world, going back to people who created spreadsheet models or templates for presentation software or Hypercard or Visual Basic apps in the early personal computer market of the 1980s.
So we’re on a mission to create a unique community that involves smart people with all kinds of skills not just coders who love the 1s and 0s (of which I happen to be one). We want everyone to participate and we fully respect all contributions.