I just got off the phone with Anthony Whyte; I was looking for information on the Sakai Commercial Affiliates program (I'm looking for more schools to work with since my hours with University of Winnipeg will probably be decreasing at the end of September).

We talked about that for about 10 or 20 minutes; I ended up volunteering to help him figure out what a "Help Wanted / Skills to Offer" service would look like, probably based on a Sakai site in collab. The trick, I ended by coming back to more than an hour later, would probably involve figuring out the right Sakai tool(s) to use for what purpose -- mailing list versus discussion forum versus dropbox versus....

In between the SCA sandwich, we talked about about a tonne of stuff that will hopefully find its way to this blog in the coming weeks -- the almost Darwinian nature of putting forward an idea in an open community and watching it quickly evolve or die, the perception of momentum in an open source project, the perception of momentum on an open source mailing list, what role a centralized foundation should play, the role of an ED in an open source foundation vs the perceived role, leadership styles at different stages of a community's development, the role of the "domestique" in cycling, and more.

Yes, it was quite a good conversation; I hope he thought so.

What really struck me was how a simple phone call about trying to learn about whether the SCA might help me put food on the table this fall became something so much larger.

While I was talking to Anthony, I was reminded me of how magnificent (and efficient, in many ways) the Vancouver conference was for meeting people, exchanging ideas, and getting into interesting debates into where this beast called Sakai should go. I told him that I had met a bunch of people who were dissatisfied with x or y or z but didn't really show up on the lists, and that I felt like if I could provide prototypes for them, they would be there, ready to re-engage.

Perhaps the communication problem is simple Darwinism. One way I like to think about Darwinism is that every organism tries to maximize the resources for its "social group". (In this case, "organism" might mean an individual or an idea).

The problem with mailing lists, then, is that the denser the population, the easier it is to monopolize the resources. With Sakai, this would reflect how broad-ranging the conversations that exist on sakai-dev can be, but how relatively few people sometimes seem to control the "momentum" of that list.

While I give full kudos to Clay, Ray, Stephen, Bill, Antranig and the others who are willing to stand up and offer an alternative opinion, I'm not convinced that sakai-dev really demonstrates a "healthy" community. From a Darwinian point of view, sakai-dev often feels like a monoculture to me, and we all know that monocultures can be wildly successful, but eventually tend to fail spectacularily.

In fairness, more Sakai lists are evolving and getting their feet under them. Presumably every time a conference happens, diversity within the Sakai community increases.

So what does this all mean? Well, I am not a socioligist, but it seems pretty clear to me that open source or distributed projects like Sakai need to work hard to provide and encourage alternatives to the primary modes of communication, and discussing how those alternatives should work together to avoid the opposite problem, that of splitting the community into smaller cells that don't communicate between themselves!

As Anthony pointed out, blogs such as this one are an important start. But choosing the right tools for the "Help Wanted / Services to Offer" is part of it.

And you know what? I think I'll check out the next Breeze meeting the UI group holds (can anyone send a link to a schedule?), just to see how that medium works for me and for others that I may have met at Vancouver.

Anthony convinced me of the importance of really getting this blog going and using it as an alternative medium to share my ideas with the community; I'd like to return the favour to him and to anyone else out there and encourage you all to get a blog up.

It's good for the community, and good for our ideas.