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Guilt in Open Source Projects
dalin
dalin Dec 7, 2008

Recently at an OpenEverything unconference I attended a session on Guilt in Open Communities run by John Britton. John and I are interested in seeing what thoughts the Drupal community has on the subject.

Some topics we might talk about (feel free to suggest more):

  1. "I was in GSOC, but now I don't contribute much anymore. I feel like I took the money and ran."
  2. "My Issue queue has issues over 6 months old. Those poor blokes that are using my modules..."
  3. Gift economy vs. commerce economy.
  4. Obligation, guilt, and gratitude.
2 Comments
It was a really interesting discussion.
johndbritton
johndbritton Dec 8, 2008

I really enjoyed the discussion we had at http://openeverything.hk/2008, The session was entitled "Guilt in Open Organizations" but it evolved into a talk focusing on Guilt, Gratitude, Shame, Obligation, and more in Open projects and the role of the individual in a gift/free economy.

Interesting topic
Jaza
Jaza Feb 7, 2009

I guess that guilt rears its (ugly?) head for most OSS contributors at some point, but then again, most of us also get over it pretty quickly. It's easy to conquer guilt, just by remembering: "hey, I never had any obligation to hang around and keep contributing / maintaining, and people should be happy that I helped as much as I did". Anyway, I'd be interested to hear other people's thoughts on the topic. Hope to catch up with your guys in DC!