Social Architecture

What Hacker News says

1. timdaubNov 2021
   Hintjens is quoted too little these days considering how great many of his speeches and essays are. To me, he's the epistemic authority on developing software collaboratively and following his principles has aided my career.

   "Social Architecture" should be read by any aspiring open source developer.

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2. mcintSep 2020
   You have to get people there, and you have to get them to want to bother coming back.

   1. raise awareness. e.g. though word-of-mouth recommendations, or advertising (online, TV, events, IRL?)

   2. it has to have something to keep attention,

   3. it has to be worth coming back to

   It happens through phased growth, sometimes explicitly planned, always interactively managed. A marketing and sales pipeline provides a google-able articulated view of a similar process. Or go as far "Manufacturing Consent"

   They're built on positive feedback cycles, where contributions spur further engagement of viewing, and prompting others to engage. These are called virtuous cycles, when it's going in a desired direction (e.g. more contributions drive more views drive more contributions), and vicious cycles when they're not (bad drives out the good, e.g. toleration of off-topic / inappropriate content, deters helpful contributors from returning, while encouraging more detrimental contributions).

   I would recommend reading Peter Hintjen's "Social Architecture"[1]. He addresses a question worded exactly the same as yours. He built a more narrowly scoped community as an integral part of building the ZeroMQ messaging library and tools, and ensuring that it was useful to as many people as possible.

   Also, check out his other books [2]. Though, note that gitbook.com broke the links, and e.g.

   https://www.gitbook.com/book/hintjens/social-architecture/de...

   becomes

   https://hintjens.gitbooks.io/social-architecture/content/

   [1]: https://hintjens.gitbooks.io/social-architecture/content/

   [2]: http://hintjens.com/books

   I'm planning to grow a group chat (matrix self-hosted) with friends, into a dev.to-forked blogging community, that I can share with other tech friends, non-tech friends, co-workers, and use to explain work successes to family.

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3. specialistJun 2020
   Thank you u/bondolo and u/bawolff.

   I'm fascinated by governance, transparency, accountability. For instance, I've been casually researching how to measure effectiveness of state legislators, how the misc rules impact the games they play.

   Learning how wikipedia does things, for better or worse, is on my todo list. I'm hoping there's works like Peter Hintjens' Social Architecture for wikis. http://hintjens.com/books

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4. monocasaDec 2019
   For the future, I would totally read Social Architecture. It's available here for free (libre and gratis), and is not long, 100 pages or so printed. https://hintjens.gitbooks.io/social-architecture/content/

   A huge part of that is how to structure an open source project so that it can't be taken from the community. Basically a combo of GPL and taking community contributions without having them assign copyright to you is the most full proof way to keep something open source.

   To answer your question, if they own everything they can relicense it any way they see fit. Only by having your code mixed with others' that you don't own can you practically protect it from forced relicensing.

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5. specialistSep 2019
   Belated reply, apologies.

   I read Social Architecture (after my Kuali experience). It's very good. In my head, it sits alongside Clay Shirky (eg Here Comes Everyone).

   Whenever questions like "how do I make money working on open source?" and "which license should I use?" comes up, I expect Hintjens' wisdom to be at the top.

   Alas. I'd cite Hintjens myself, but I have yet to put his wisdom to practice, so I'd be just another poseur.

   I also read his writings about health and dying. I can only hope that I have such grace when it's my time.

   His others are in my queue.

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6. monocasaJun 2019
   I'm a big fan of Social Architecture by Pieter Hintjens, and it's explanation for why he picked GPL instead a BSD license.

   BSD tends to fracture the community, and the community is generally even more important than the code, per se.

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