Open source is a company; social media is a country

At the Sourceforge breakfast this morning we got some questions on what the organizational differences are between open source and social media. Here’s my answer:

One of the paradoxes of early 20th Century management was the observation that companies are best run as dictatorships, while countries are best run as democracies. Why was this? Management theorist Charles Barnard, in his theory of the firm, proposed that it was because organizations existed for a common “shared purpose”.  Countries, on the other hand, existed only to serve their people.

Shared purpose required singular vision, leadership and top-down control. Serving the people, on the other hand, benefits from bottoms-up recognition of needs and collective decision-making (voting).

Many people mistakenly think that open source projects are emergent, self-organized and democratic. The truth is just the opposite: most are run by a benevolent dictator or two. What makes successful open source projects is leadership, plain and simple. One or two people articulate a vision, start building towards it and bring others on board with specific tasks and permissions. The best projects are the ones with the best leaders.

Social media, on the other hands, doesn’t exist for a shared purpose. It exists to serve the individual. We don’t tweet to built Twitter, we tweet to suit ourselves. We blog because we can, not because we have signed on to a blogging project.

Seen this way, open source projects are like companies. Social media is like a country. Benevolent dictatorships rule the first; democracy the second.

The point: the nature of participation is very different between open source and social media, even though people tend to lump them together into "peer production". Open source is hierarchical by design, while social media structure is simply ruled by popularity.

Comments

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[Linda Sullivan]

Wow. Really Nice!!!

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be careful what you wish for

[Mike]

Thanks for the great info

Mike

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[key management software]

Great post. You have clearly stated the difference between the an open source and social media.

[Chris]

Very Nice and clear difference between social media and open source

I never looked at it like this and this is excellent insight

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[Sandy]

You might consider open source as dictatorship, but the fact is that they provide a service which all bloggers use today...

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[Thailand Hotels]

Open source is a company; social media is a country. Interesting word.
But I agree with trench.

[maxomen]

attribution note: The OP refers to management theorist Charles Barnard. It's more likely the theorist in question is CHESTER Barnard.

I should not know, but long ago I endured a college course the core content of which was the man's insightful - but stylistically impenetrable - magnum opus.

[Ricky]

I am all for open source!

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nice writing. very interesting thought between open source and social media. :)
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[lice-killer-treatment-time]

Very interesting insight. I've known many people from Japan that recently moved here, and what is mentioned is pretty right on from what you said. Amazingly accurate too. And micro-organizations do in fact run more smoothly...i think.
Scott

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There is a difference between open source and social media, from what I have been able to decifer. Open sourse a dictatorship, not sure Id go that far though.

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[Rizza]

well virality is the key as popularity, public importance it is.

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[Terri Davis]

I definately agree with this post. If Twitter and other social media sites did have one dictator as a ruler then all the Tweets would be about the same topic and Twitter would no longer be a democracy serving it's users! With SourceForge it is necessary to have the one or two "dictators" as such to drive the project to completion just like project managers.

Terri D

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From being around some open source projects, and having read a lot of the emails about various other ones, I think there is a lot of variety.
I read somewhere Linus Torvalds had a lot of success with the Linux kernel because, while he wrote so-so implementations, he wrote great interfaces, which let other programers improve the implementations; and his personality style and humor fit in well with a certain culture.
The Apache project, with maybe twenty core contributors early on, who were heavily systems administrators, is a different story in collaboration.

[John]

Hard for me to grasp, but nice read though

[Darnals]

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[How to make money]

Hmm.....this is something I have never thought about. Social media is for ourselves and fascism is for the country.

[John]

Great article, you make some very good points about social media. Great way of explaining things and laying them out.

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[Sharon]

Yeah,

This post was cool.

I like how you do your social media.

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[Svetoslav Spasov]

You touched on some very important points here. Although, maybe, the golden mean is somewhere in between. No pun intended :)

[Richard]

Leadership is required in any type of ventures, open source or otherwise. But I just don't get why people that works hard, articulate vision, start building, bring people etc is clasiffied as dictatorship? I dont see those traits described as dictatorships anywhere

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Yea i agree Rich

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Such a really wonder Great post. You have clearly stated the difference between the an open source and social media.

[Mr.Financial]

That s very Great Idea to light up the idea in the morning.

[Richard Smith]

I agree that open-source projects should be like a dictatorship. The difference between these and political dictatorships that we see around the world, is that the people to control these open-source projects have an innate ability to get everyone else on board to help with their projects. Perhaps world leaders should take a lesson from these people?

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[capz space]

Thanks for the nice info

[okazii]

yeah the post is good, but the picture is not such a good.

[sasha grey]

Big open source communities, like Debian, KDE and GNOME are run by democratic processes as a whole, but are composed of smaller projects with different ways of organization. Benevolent dictatorships for life are often used in smaller and less complex communities, like the Linux kernel and the Python language.

[Impuissance]

Excellent thought.

[Catherine]

"One of the paradoxes of early 20th Century management was the observation that companies are best run as dictatorships, while countries are best run as democracies."

There are some successful companies emerging run by democracy, with employees of all levels helping to make various top level decisions.

[Belinda]

Very interesting thought. The difference between the an open source and social media is clearly stated.

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[Pinas Got Talent]

I really agree on the last few words of this that"Open source is hierarchical by design, while social media structure is simply ruled by popularity". Social media, in anyway can help or really put down a certain personality or businesses. With the open source thing, sometimes, it really hard to cope up with it.

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[Johnny Bravo]

well, it seems to me that in some case a project need more than collaboration.
Some organisation need a leader to reach the goal.

For example : to develop a CMs, i think collaboration is not enough.

It's the same for countries. People vote for a person. Even if a program is set up by a community, to be elected you need somebody to personify it.

It's what happen with Obama.

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nice post really enjoyed the read

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nice post very good read

[excalibur 1000]

"Many people mistakenly think that open source projects are emergent, self-organized and democratic. The truth is just the opposite: most are run by a benevolent dictator or two."

Open source projects need to be. Otherwise you'll have every wannabe know-it all attempting to hijack the project. A benevolent dictator will give direction to a project.

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[tom]

This is a great idea

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[news4usa]

This is missing a few key differences in the two systems.
First, it is much easier to leave a free software project / company and join another or start their own. In fact, starting new projects and companies happens all the time, and is one of the primary sources of innovation.
at all i will search for new news about that