People Management in Open Source Projects
Section from Cesar Harada's http://www.cesarharada.com/personal-reasons-for-concentrating-on-protei-inc-and-give-open-h2o-more-autonomy/
People Management
In terms of “Community Management” (Open-H2O) and “Human Resources” (Protei INC), the structures are totally different. In Open-H2O, members have to tolerate their differences ; in Protei INC the manager needs to be able to decide what is produced and for how much, by who, when, where and how (process). As the CEO of Protei INC I want to be able to decide who I work with, pay people to work on what I know is relevant for the company. As a researcher in Open-H2O I have to appreciate and learn from divergent opinions and theories.
My experience is that it is possible that an open source project would self-regulate itself if members have a common goal (having an influent leader and/or a strong and simple vision helps) but I found that many people attracted to “open source” projects tend to be really nice, open minded but undisciplined. That’s not always true, but generally true in my experience, and that gets more true if people are not paid, some will think they can do whatever they want and not tolerate any form of authority : open source does not mean anarchy. Open source projects needs moderation and often even smarter/more subtle management techniques and close follow up. One of my favourite talk dealing with managing an open source community : “Google I/O 2008 – Open Source Projects and Poisonous People” by Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman (Google 2008)