One of the things I got thinking about during my weekend away at the fantastic LugRadio Live! was the question of how to attract users to Linux / OSS. This was a question that was put out to the audience during the Live and Unleashed recording on Saturday afternoon, and I missed getting my points in I did, however, have interesting discussions with some guys during the party, and Matt & Pickle on the way back to the hotel.

Currently in the community we have a view that stems mostly from Eric S. Raymonds ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar’ that says that all users are basically part of the development process, because all users can find bugs. And so much of our focus is ensuring that users become good community members, and that they log bugs, and ask smart questions, so that we can all get along in our big community. Therefore our main aim is really to recruit community members, who should, at a bare minimum, log bugs, but ideally will also help other members with problems, write documentation, draw artwork or even code.

I think this is wrong…..

I think there are, essentially, 3 types of person within any one project:

1. Users – these are people that use the software. They want help when it breaks, but they don’t necessarily want to interact at any other point.
2. Community members – people that are actively involved in the community around the software, but are generally reactive – they reports bugs as they find them, and might answer questions on a forum/mailing list.
3. Community contributors – the developers, documenters, etc. People who proactively produce something that benefits the project.

Now – people can move through the stages. Most people will start at 1. Some will move to 2. Even fewer will move to 3. In the past the FLOSS community has basically rejected people who refuse to move to 2. Conversely, most efforts to increase usership often try to either bring people straight into 2, or bring them in to 1, but expect them to be 2.

Some suggestions

So, if we make this realisation on the categories, what do we need to do to support such an infrastructure:

• We need to develop a support mechanism for the Level 1 people. These people will not and never will log bugs, or ask ‘Smart’ questions. And they should not be required to. If this were commercial software, then they wouldn’t. They could contact support and ask anything they like. We need to be able to do the same. We need to breed a group of ‘level 1 support’ community members, who will happily answer the same stupid question all the time. It’s a sucky job, but without it I think we will continue to struggle to introduce large numbers of people to FLOSS
• We need to recognise that a majority of level 1 people will never become level 2. They will not file bugs, they will not become part of the community, they will not write documentation. Essentially they will only do 2 things:
  1. Use your software
  2. Complain if it doesn’t do what they expect – which may either be a bug, or a user error

  We cannot ignore these people, but we do have to learn how to deal with them

• We need to discover good ways to attract new level 1 people. This will be the entry point for 99% of people
• We need to work out how to convert people from being level 1 people to being level 2 people, without making it seem mandatory, and thus alienating the people who will only ever be level 1.
• We need to create communities that are not necessarily based on contribution, but merely on membership. Analysers of social trend say that, in this day and age, people first need to feel that they belong, then they will begin to believe, and only lastly will their behaviour change. We need to create communities where people can just belong. Once they then begin to ‘believe’ in that community, then they can recieve opportunities to take action, and ‘behave’ as a community member should.

Anyway – that’s just a few thoughts to begin with. I’d appreciate peoples thoughts/comments, especially experiences with communities and support from both open source and closed source software.

mrBen

Interesting thoughts but how do you build a community of type 1 people who are by their nature not going to post on forums or join mailing lists or IRC channels. A fair number of these people are highly IT literate in a way some type 2 or 3 people aren’t so technical competence isn’t the real issue its a willingness to be involved.

So how do you get people to feel they belong to a community they neither contibute to or (initially) care about? Sites like myspace have done it but I cant see how the model transfers and only type 2&3 people are likely to come to LRL07 . Ideas?

I think you and I have independently come to *exactly* the same conclusion. Following the WIOS talk, I realised that there is *nowhere* I would be happy to send my Mum for help. Later, and after several discussions with various people but especially Jono, I realised that there’s *nowhere* I would be happy to send my Dad for help, for precisely the same reasons – they’d get frustrated at being told RTFM and give up.

We’re setting up a project with the aim of building a single point of contact for frontline support of all major FLOSS. We’re just trying to get the basics straightened out, and we’ve got a mailing list that I’ll send you details of.

Well said, mrBen! I had to deal with some VIPs this week. They *had* to use a PC to do some of their work, but their skills were severely lacking. Moving windows, saving documents to anywhere other than My Documents, right-clicking and so on were all a struggle for them. When you buy a car, does the manufacturer expect you to become a mechanic too? When you’re flying, are you expected to do some navigation? No. You want to use the thing and leave all the technical stuff to people who (hopefully) have an aptitude for it. I come home from work (I do IT support, amongst other things) and when I switch on my own PC I want to press a button and start listening to music, or browsing the net, or play games, or (Heaven forbid) develop my web site. I *don’t* want to have to fiddle with settings or work around bugs trying to get these things to run.

nibil – the point is that you don’t _try_ and build a community of type 1s. You build a community from your type 2 and 3s. But you have to provide a source of support for your type 1s. Your pool of type 1s is loosely connected to the community because they are users. And some will probably then move further into that community.

While I grudgingly accept that you’re right, I still think that the community aspects are highly important.

It’s crazy to expect people who don’t report bugs in software that they’ve paid for, to report bugs in software that they have less of a vested interest in, but I suspect that a large part of that stems from the fact that the major provider of such software doesn’t listen, and is not responsive, and indeed, if you phone to ask for support, they want to charge you for the privilege.

Free Software shouldn’t be like that, yes, it’s a tricky balance between volunteers and commercial software providers, many projects are personal itches that have been scratched, and then distributed, hey, if you have the same itch that needs scratched, help yourself.

Free Software has long been a eddy for Type 1 users, many of them are inevitably pulled into Type 2s, the trick is in making it not appear forcible.

mrBen, think about, what LRL is really all about, think about the strength of #Scotlug and Scotlug, community!, we should continue to provide a strong force that draws people in, you only have to look at the number of people across the Free Software world, who have only “dropped in for a quick question” but been become Type 2s and beyond.

Perhaps the niche between Type 1 and Type2/3 is what sensibly can be filled by people who are willing to provide that buffer, I’d argue, that like the top-programmers, these people are a rarity, and should be treasured, but you only have to look at the recent “Tuttle Town-Manager” incident to know that there are Type 0s out there, and the “buffer” role can be a tough one…

bigkev – I totally agree with you that community is one of our greatest assets, and definitely something to be treasured and protected. The problem I have is that if we are serious about open source becoming the dominant player in the software market, we need to address the Type 1s as well.

The most important realisation in this for me was that there will be a vast swathe of Type 1s who never become Type 2s, and I just don’t think we’re currently set up to deal with these people, even in the places where Type 1s are encouraged (Firefox probably being the canonical example).

If we can mould our community to take the vast amounts of knowledge and experience, and present it in a way that helps Type 1s, then we have the ability to not only produce technically excellent software, but to also produce world-class support that truly does meet customer demand.

Ben im sure this has got nothing to do with this post but can you block IP addresses from supergingerman jst im gettin the ned commenting