 So, I am going to talk about some experiences that I have had with building communities. Basically, two experiments that I accidentally ran over the last few years, mainly because I wasn't intending to run two experiments. I didn't think I was an academic or any sort, I was just trying to figure out how to make a living. But, what I realized retrospect is that I did end up running two very different approaches to organizing community, one very top-down, one very bottom-up, which has little interesting results. So, I only have about four of my slides, which I basically made in the last half an hour, just to give you a bit of background, and then it's going to be a discussion after that. So, basically, some background on what I have done, I used to hang out on bulletin boards back in the 90s, got my first understanding of how communities work online in the 96 to 98 period. This was when 200 people were online in India, and that was about it. And I was quite lucky to be part of small groups like this, who had absolutely nothing in common with each other, apart from the fact that they had some kind of connection that was not on the internet, that was entirely on phone networks. And from there, I became part of the Mumbai and Bangalore Linux-related groups. I used to work in Mumbai's chip magazine in 1999. I put Red Hat 6.0 on the cover of chip magazine in August 1999, and a lot of people here discovered Linux to one of the series. Either it was the series that I put out, or the series that I think it was put out in this request. Obviously, Apple did it a lot more regularly than I did. And after a while, I got involved with the bar camp community. I did the first bar camp in Bangalore in 2006, and it's now the 14th edition. So it's become a moment that's pretty much taken off by itself. So after doing all of these things, I basically learned a bunch of things about how community events work. And I'd say, these are all common things, you know, one, project does never work. Usually it's two reboots, and by the time you have gotten the project to working, your web page is gone. If you have a speaker trying to use a web-based slide show, you know, the guy's a rookie. He's never done a content stock before because he can't load his slides anymore. Who seen this happen? You've never seen someone have trouble loading slides. This is once this morning. So mics go off by themselves all day. I am sure you've heard all kinds of quicks and boobs and what not coming from the mics since morning. I've seen a conference with 18 parallel tracks. I don't know how to manage it. I have no idea who knows how anything works. If you're lucky, the talk will actually happen after all the problems with getting the talk going. If it's up to one hour late, it's all right. It's that's normal. So now these things I'm sure you identify with as being fairly common with how events work. Does that sound all right or does it sound exciting? I hope I haven't lost you all day. No one's got a comment. Does this sound normal? This stuff. So this was basically the thing that got me fairly bugged after so many years of being part of community and how community events work. And I figured this is the point where you got to fix this. You've got to do this right because we keep being amateurish because we take pride in not doing even professionally because all of us say, hey, we're here for the content in the community. We're not here to make the trains run on time or make the slides run on time and so forth. So I got fed up enough to say, I'm going to fix this. I'm going to figure out how to run events properly. So I did that. And one of the things you need to accept when you start doing things like this is normally we think of communities as being a free place for anyone to do what they feel like. But if you want to make an event run on time, you can't do that. If your speaker doesn't show up on time, you give him a shouting. You don't say, it's OK. You can go along half an hour late and we'll just keep the audience waiting. That stuff doesn't work anymore. So this essentially forces you to think of how you're going to impose order on the community. You're going to make sure that the talk starts on time. You're going to make sure you harass the speaker to make sure he shows up on time. That's his computer on time. Make sure everything runs on time. And this means that it is not an open community anymore. You're imposing order. You're forcing people to do things for the greater good. But you're the tyrant here. You're the one forcing people to do things the way you want them to be done. And so this was something that I had to accept and say, if this is the way to make events work properly, I'm going to do that. And basically what you've managed to do in the last four and a half years since I started doing this is I managed to organize more than 30 conferences, hosting more than 10,000 people across these 30 conferences. Also managed to get this going as a business so that we have 10 people at least full-time all the time, running market rate salaries, and created five events that are now well-known brands within this country. And those are the five up there. So this has been possible while still running an open source company. So the GitHub website there is where you can find a source code to everything that you've done. It's got 50 plus repositories. It's had over 30 people contributing to something or other over the last few years. Tens of thousands of lines of code. One of the projects is created. It's called Funnel. And this seems really empty to talk about because Funnel was confusing some people over what it was funneling. This has also been used by PyCon India. It's been used by FOSTA, NITC. It's been used by an IT Bombay event and so forth. Now this is a tool for scheduling talks at a conference, for selecting and scheduling talks. Being accepted by the community used a lot. If you're going to see it online, it's at talkfunnel.com. This is what it looks like. Right now you can see a list of events that are coming up that are based on this event. I mean, they're a base that are coming up right now. And if you pick one, you can submit a talk to it and so forth. So this is a tool that has essentially been the tool by which we imposed order on the community. You tell the community that if you want to talk at an event, you fill out a submission form right here, online, submit it, and anybody can look at what you submitted and tell you whether you like it or not. As an event organizer, I can see these little aeroplane icons that tell me that this guy is not in the city in which the conference is being organized. Therefore, there are logistical issues to deal with if I take the speaker. So build tools like this as a way to just get things going and so forth. Now, in the process of doing all this, I kept running into one request that I did not think I'd ever be interested in. And there was people asking me this question. So someone says, hey, that was a nice talk. Can you help me find a Python programmer? And you say, okay, maybe there's somebody in this group here, but I don't know you guys. It's not like I've seen your resumes. So if you ask me and say, okay, finally a Python programmer is like, I'm sorry, but I don't know these people. People don't come to the conference and give me resumes and say, help me find a job at the end of this process. So this was something that would keep happening over and over again. Yeah, was there a question up there? Or somebody on a phone? So this would keep happening and this was the problem I had absolutely no interest in. And this question of what do I do now? It's gotten to the point where I'm being harassed about this. So I figured we're going to build one more community tool that takes care of this particular problem. But given that this is a problem where I'm not interested in solving, unlike, say with events, I knew I wanted it to work in a certain manner. So we were going to fix that. So we set about creating procedures for imposing order on a community. In this case it's about saying, please help yourselves, do not bother me. And essentially saying, go away. Sort this out for yourself. So we started doing that. We built a site that people could use to post jobs for themselves. This is also an open source website. I'm sure you've seen this at some point or other because a lot of people have seen this without realizing that this is the site that they saw last time. So how many of you people haven't seen this before? Is this new for you? Have you guys seen this site before? Not seen the site? All right, so if you haven't seen the site, go ahead and explore it. It's basically just a bunch of jobs. Somebody wants a senior share point developer. This is what they're offering. And basically says, this is the requirements. This is what they want. If you fit the bill, if you have all of these characteristics and sounds interesting, then apply for a job. And apply for the job basically means a lot of forms submitted and you have sent your resume to the employer. It's up to them to decide if they're like you or not. They'll respond to you. So this is a site that basically does not take up any of my time on a digital basis. I simply make sure the site does not crash. It runs by the community. People help themselves and to give you some stats, by doing events, I managed to basically get about 30 conferences organized, helping about 10,000 people over a four and a half year period. But when you build a site that the community runs by itself, and then you go and see what they've managed to do. It gets a lot more interesting. This will probably take a while to load because you don't know what the connection is like. So while it's running, this is a site that's now used by this many people in the last 24 hours. So at about between call to 1 p.m. today, there have been 206 anonymous users on this website looking at jobs. And this is basically someone who is currently active on the website. And this is a little low compared to what it was yesterday. For the last two weeks, you can see that it's on average being used by 3,390 users on a day. That's a slightly higher peak. Two weeks back it was 0 and 600 users on a day. So this is a site that unlike the previous one, where it was completely about saying, I want to impose order on the community, which means that I'm going to look at every single aspect of operation and push people into doing it the right way. So it's about pushing people into getting things done and time pushing people into making sure that coordination happens on time, that things are done well, food is properly cooked, whatever else. On this hand is something that I don't bother with at all and yet it works. And if I could choose by a lot more people, then something that actually takes up so much of my time to do by myself. So once again, you want to get a bit of stats on how many people are actually using this stuff? I didn't go to login to the server, give you stats on the database directly so you know what's going on. I don't know if you guys can see the number at the bottom of the screen over there. It's a little faint, but basically it says there have been 47,984 users on this website since we started acquiring logins which was about two years back. So example of a site that works. And what I want to talk about is how is it possible that something that runs by itself can also do better and still work, whereas some other things require you to force the community to behave in certain ways. And this is the part where I want to turn it over and say let's talk about what your experiences have been with bottom-up self-organizing system versus top-down order-based systems. And which one works for what context for you? Satish, I'm going to put a mic at you if you don't speak up. So you've done a bit of community organizing and you've been nice to have your thoughts on what you've seen work and not work. I haven't seen if you have a prescription that you can do that at this particular situation and takes top-down and all that. But the one thing that I've realized is that if you have a lot of people invested in achieving an objective that's fairly well-defined and understood, self-organizing communities get things done better, much faster than if you try even if it's denouvelin dictatorship. That doesn't work out. So over the period of time what I've come to understand is that if you can define the objective better, you have a better self-organized community. You do have to put in processes for self-organization. That infrastructure is still there. So everyone else, I'll take a look at this. So we have something actually pointed out of putting that self-organizing communities. They work well better, but we've got to put some writings around that. And we pointed out that in the top-down approach, you did put some order, but then it's not open anymore. But I suddenly disagree with that because most of the communities anyway, they try to build bottom up, but then they put somebody at the top to actually manage things and put some ordinances at the same time remaining open. And comparing communities like, for example, the Fedora community here. I'm associated with the Python community. So the Python community and the way Python's work versus the way Haski conferences work. There's still a little difference because I haven't seen that much of volunteer-driven work happening with Haski conferences. Because still there's not a lot of probably a much larger content and no single goal for a community to push behind. And probably that's the reason why there's more focus and more order required from the top-down approach as compared to the communities coming together. And then also agreeing to the top-down approach or the order that is applied, whoever it is. But in general, I would also say that community that organize themselves, set their parts, but also like somebody to have put some order so that there is people are in order behaving as they're supposed to be, making sure that the events actually go down the way they should go. What makes this? This is an interesting point. How much of top-down control do you need versus how much of bottom-up? And yeah, so I need a mic volunteer. Can someone pick up one of the mics and pass them around? So it'll make it easier to have a conversation. And guys, please come forward. I'm not coming all the way back to give you a mic. So I am reminded of an article. I'll try to find it, which is an interesting analysis of how Wikipedia works, whether it's actually a top-down community or a bottom-up community, because there's actually debate on that. Is it top-down or bottom-up? So I'm going to try finding the article, and PJP, you have a point of view. Yeah, I think the distance between has to do with the personal incentives. In the case of why Hashtag works so well without any intervention is because he made a point that Hashtag works without any intervention. And whereas for any content problem, you have to be a person within a model. And my point on that is it has a lot to do with the personal incentives. The person who is coming to the conferences has an incentive of giving a class, but not so much on giving it on time or doing it properly. So if he could manage to track that incentive class, it's not going to happen, but it's on time properly. The self-government aspect of it comes from the incentive part. So I think incentive is a fairly interesting point. So I'm still searching for the article. Anyone else want to take a go? So I've contributed to a problem of communities by now. I find that the distance between the community is organized around what they define as a member of the community. There's a path to membership. And that is the incentive for you to be organized around the activities of the community. And if I take a different community, for instance, I contribute to Mozilla. Mozilla has a path, but you don't need to follow that path. And it is way more confusing in Mozilla unless you have the self-motivation to drive your contribution if you're actually going to work. Because there's a lot of blocks along the way and all the time. The same kind of block that was happening in Ubuntu, the thing is there's a membership, and there's this sort of feeling of community that comes with being a member, that it somehow works. And the other small point is that Mozilla has some oversight, Ubuntu has some oversight with the community council. But it's only got one Venezuelan dictator who can mitigate his way, but he needs a majority. He has a veto, but he doesn't do it very often. And then you have the community council driving the leadership to the most extent. Okay, so I think this is something worth going into deeper, you know, Ubuntu versus Mozilla as communities that you and I are familiar with. For the others here, it will probably be Fedora versus Mozilla. What do you see working for one community and not working for other communities and so forth? So how many people here are members of at least two communities like this? Okay, you guys want to talk about what do you see different between the way these communities are managed? So while we're doing that, so this is the article I was trying to look for. It's called, The Bottom is Not Enough. It was published a few years back. I don't see a date on it, but let's see. So one of the things that this article makes is the 2008 article. So obviously it's been a while, but Kevin Kelly is the founder of Viad Magazine, Viad Magazine's internet edition. He is the guy who basically built one of the first websites that was commercially backed versus just being a hobbyist website. And he also was one of the editors of the Whole Earth catalog. That's the magazine that Steve Jobs cited when he said, stay hungry, stay foolish. So Kevin Kelly is essentially Steve Jobs' intellectual mentor. And he's still alive and he's still writing. And in 2008, he made an interesting post saying that he does not believe that Wikipedia is a bottom-up community-driven encyclopedia. He thinks it's in fact top-down. And this is his article explaining why he thinks so. And he essentially says that in any community, you will find that there is always a small core group of highly motivated individuals who keep pushing the community forward. And if you do not have this core group, the community as a large mass will not move towards outcomes. Again, I thought this was very interesting. But no matter what you're trying to do, if you want to make progress, you're going to have to do this top-down. So interesting point, I think it's useful to just read the article and see if you can find anything in it strictly or not. It's easy to find, it's kk.org slash the technium slash the dash bottom dash is dash n. Yeah, I'll read it. And I guess it's also not very readable on screen, but yeah, we'll read the link so you can have a look at it. So over there. One of you guys had something to say, right? So I was asking you guys about communities. Which communities are you part of? Hi, I'm Lala. So I actually initially- Lala, turn the camera, point it to yourself. No, that's fine. So I initially started a group into community because I had no idea about anything. So I stumbled upon Linux and find out this and that these stuff. And somebody, I went to some PyCon and saw people, you know, laptop is open too. So I came home and directly installed a module on my desktop and started logging. So what I understood from community, obviously like Sankash and said, right? The rules are different for different community, but they're common, couple of common grounds, for example. So if a community is walking towards a goal, how common the goal is or how many people kind of rise? Is there a goal as well? Yeah, is there a goal? And how many people can connect to it? Second, you need definitely infrastructure for them to grow. If somebody wants to come and contribute, if you do not have a basic infrastructure to kind of make his, I mean, there has to be some way. Maybe it might be difficult or easy, depending on the situation, but you need a way. I mean, if he doesn't find his way, he will be lost or maybe go somewhere else. So you need infrastructure. And when you put infrastructure in place, you need some people to make sure that the infrastructure works more so that I evolve gradually as the community kind of makes sure, so evolve around it. I mean, if I talk about Linux kernel, Linus actually is a benevolent dictator and stuff like that, but he has his common rules, you know? He does not change his rules much. He has this common three or four rules which have been falling from the day one till now. And other things is very flexible. I don't care whatever other people does around it, right? So even, I mean, I'm see Fedora where a lot of people self-driven. I've seen some toys where a couple of people drive the whole thing. So basically, you need a common goal where many people can connect and it can describe motivation out of it or walk towards it. And you need infrastructure. So like we keep it. We keep it as a basic infrastructure and let you actually contribute. Think about it if they don't have infrastructure and expect the community to build infrastructure, I really doubt if you'd have been gone to this far. How many of you here are active editors of Wikipedia? And yeah, so what infrastructure do you use as editor? Unlike, say, someone just reading Wikipedia. I didn't get you. I mean, is there any particular infrastructure that you use as an editor? Apart from the edit window, so is there anything else that helps you with editing? I mean, if you think contribution is just one part, then they have boards and people who can come and look at a contribution and see if it's a marketing material or you do have enough references. I mean, it's actual fact or somebody just made up a few words and put it in Wikipedia. And you have a server which kind of mirrors across multiple blobs so people can easily access Wikipedia and stuff like that. So essentially what you're saying is that the critical part is not just the edit window, but even knowing what to edit based on other activity happening on this page. Including whether a bot has been busy cleaning up this page or you can see a trusted editor who's been flagging this page for something or other. So essentially the entire discovery process before you get to editing a page. The discovery process, like how do you know what to contribute to is a discovery, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there is systems in place to help you discover. Exactly, exactly. And people with the formatting, media, Wikipedia formatting, they have made up, made like documentation so I can easily read and kind of contribute. Yeah, so this is a useful point that if you want a community to take you know, ownership or something and contribute to it, then you're depending on the community to have an onboarding process. That makes it easy because I want to say how do I start contributing to this thing? Where do I start from and what do I get out of it? Should be well defined. So it can't just be some guy at the top saying I have this vision and everybody else figure out how to achieve my vision. That won't work. Essentially that, right? Yeah. You can put a common motivation in place and make sure that you kind of follow that, the basic rule and then the other rules evolve around make sure that other people come and contribute. Anyone else got a comment? We have less than 10 minutes left, so might as well make the most of it. So who else has been part of multiple communities? What have you noticed this difference between these communities? No one else? I have not been part of multiple communities, but I have just working part of Petra. What I have seen is that one doesn't need to be convinced of the goal before joining community. I may like it as long as I keep contributing and understand hopefully what I have found is that I may get convinced at later point of time, but I don't need to be convinced to start with. Probably my initial goals are something else as I start. I haven't given much thought to the community goals as such, but it could be some selfish goals also, but then as I keep contributing and as I start starting, once it becomes a bigger, then it no longer becomes, I personally feel that being convinced of the community goal should not be a starting point as such. I mean it could be something else, but you will just start along as you keep. Personal goals. Yeah, you start with personal goals and you see as you keep going along, your personal goals might get inclined with the goals of the community. Yeah, and I think the easy example is say Wikipedia. You read content first before you edit, so obviously you're getting content of Wikipedia as personal and receivable before you say, okay, how do I contribute to this content? Or with Mozilla, you get Firefox browser for free to start with. And from there you can say, okay, how do I contribute to Mozilla? The right way to put it is there's some problem that I want to solve for myself. If it solves 10 more problems, okay, good enough, but then it's fine. And from there you can possibly build up and go on. So does anyone else have a point of view to offer on this? I think it boils down to the same incentive part which affects your action towards anything. So if you want 100 people to act in certain order, there has to be some incentive for them to do that. Otherwise, we see it every day that people don't always follow which is right or which is in the best interest of everything, for every person. It could be like wearing helmet or not honking on the street or just starting a talk on time and problem. It boils down to the incentive aspect of that. Sorry, so since we are out of time, I think just to briefly summarize, there are two ways to organize communities. You can do it either very top-down where you say you think this is disorganized and therefore you'll bring some order to the space and force people into accepting order. Obviously with feedback, so you're not a dictator. And the second order is to say, we're going to design a system so that everything is done by people entirely by themselves without a leader on top, without someone watching over and saying, we will do things, we will tell you what to do. And what happens in most real world communities is there ends up being a mix of this. Whether you look at Wikipedia or Mozilla or Ubuntu, Ubuntu for instance, very clearly defined, I would say every six months there will be a release. And this is important. This is the unviable goal. You can't not make a release. Now if you have to make a release, let's figure out how you can organize community around that goal. And I think that works really well. And I think this is basically why Ubuntu became so successful so quickly, that this was the rallying point for the crowd. Six months make a release. You can't effort to say, I will do this two years later when I feel like it. So that's worked as an example of saying one top-down goal and some infrastructure to ensure that goal happens. And everything else bottom up saying, how do you work towards that goal? Or on Wikipedia, it's the systems of rules that they have. They impose rules on the fact that you must have a neutral point of view. You can't advertise and so forth. These are all very top-down approaches. Somebody in the leadership has decided that this is what Wikipedia is going to be. And they will ensure that happens. And everything else is entirely done by volunteers saying I'm going to edit and add to it in some way. And if it violates some top-down rules and somebody is going to comment smack me and say undo the edit and so forth. No, so it's an interesting system that some top-down, some bottom-up usually works. And this is one useful thing to say if you're trying to build a community, you'll have to work out and say how much of this needs to be top-down? How much of it needs to be bottom-up? And how do you know you're doing it the wrong way or the right way? All right, so does anyone else have anything else to add or does you can say close this and more to the next talk? All right, I think we're done. So thanks again.