Open Source & The Cathedral

Nicholas Carr distinguishes between the 'Cathedral' and 'Bazaar' model. The former is the traditional model 'from the ground up' for development of product and services and the later describes the 'Open Source' movement. The question is whether the Bazaar model can be used for everything like it was used for the development of Linux.

Carr claims that the bazaar model is most and only useful for actions that are divisible and require little coordination effort. Debugging is a typical tasks that can be parallelized. Like in an easter egg hunt, the bazaar model works best if there is a simple task 'find the easter eggs' and there are many independent participants.

The cathedral method is preferred for other tasks, e.g. product development from the ground up. It would be very challenging to develop a product in this way with so many participants. It should be noted, however, that even in the Linux project there was a tight advisory crowd that coordinated the debugging efforts of all the people. This ensured that the overall project moved into the right direction forward. As a side note, Wikipedia, another bazaar style project, does not have this kind of authority which makes it prone to prone to delays and errors.

In short, peer production works best for:

1. Routine tasks that can be pursued simultaneously by a big crowd

2. Projects in which labor is donated and can be parallelized.

3. Projects that are not totally egalitarian or democratic.

Source: Nicholas G. Carr, The Ignorance of Crowds, Business & Strategy, Summer 2007.

Building true teams

The scientists sought to compare successful teams with less successful ones, and figure out exactly how they differed in composition. They focused on a few academic fields, defining successful teams as those whose papers were most frequently cited. They also looked at the annals of Broadway musicals over the past century and studied how the mix of composers, lyricists, directors and so forth correlated with the success of the production, measured in terms of the number of weeks a production ran before closing.

What they found was that the most successful teams did two things right. First, they attracted a mixture of experienced people and those who were newcomers to whichever field they were in. That's not surprising—the need for fresh blood has long been recognized as an important ingredient in success. The second criterion, though, was far less obvious. What successful teams had in common was at least a few experienced members who had never collaborated with each other. "People have a tendency to want to work with their friends—people they've worked with before," says Luis Amaral, a physicist at Northwestern and a coauthor. "That's exactly the wrong thing to do."

Source: True Teamwork, Fred Guterl, Newsweek International.

Networking advice

-- Never keep score. If your interactions are ruled by generosity, your rewards will follow.
-- Your relationships with others are your finest, most credible expression of who you are and what you have to offer.
-- Give your time and expertise freely. It is like Miracle-Gro® for networks.
-- The best time to build a network is before you need it.
-- Do your homework. Never pick up the phone or plan an introduction before knowing as much as possible about your contact.
-- There's no need to ponder who picks up the lunch check. Generosity is the key to success. -- With networking, it's better to give before you receive.
-- Don't come to the party empty-handed. You're only as good as what you give away.
-- Social scientists are proving that people who are more connected with other people live longer and are healthier.

Source: Never at alone