On Thursday, February 28, 2013 19:03:18 Pete Muir wrote:
...
>>
>> "When we talk about community in the The Open Source Way, we mean the
>> community of contributors who are a superset to all other
>> communities."
>>
...
>
> The intention in that statement is to say something like, "We know
> people use the term community to refer to all sorts of things. When we
> say 'community' in this book, we're focusing on the people who - by
> their work as a community - enable all the other communities to happen
> through tools, processes, or purpose."
Yeah, that is what I term "community of contributors" or for short,
contributors :-)
>
> Superset may be the wrong word, therefore. Super-enablers? :)
For me a superset is a very specific thing - a mathematical relationship from set
theory.
How about just calling them enablers?
I'm inclined to agree that "superset" is the wrong word. The
contributors/enablers are certainly not a superset encompassing all of the other
"communities". "Subset" would probably be more accurate most of the
time. Calling them "enablers" or "contributors" seems far more
intuitive to me.
...
For JBoss we are calling the community of contributors "contributors" and the
users "application developers", which will inevitably get shortened to
"developers". This is a bit complex, but users is a funny term when your
audience are developers.
Any suggestions for how to improve this? Perhaps we could cover this in the book, then I
can just refer out?
Calling the consumers of the technology "developers" would certainly cause
confusion. "Application developers" is clear, but it would be hard to resist the
temptation to shorten it. In other projects I've been involved in, the
"application developers" have been called "implementors". I've
never had this result in confusion, even in the rare cases when the "application
developers" call the consumers of their technology "implementors" too.
--
Patrick W. Barnes
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http://patrickwbarnes.com/
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