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Ruby / Rails community building in action

One of the nice things about living in a city like Vancouver is that there’s enough geek population to support user groups, even for rather “niche” languages like Ruby or Python.

I’ve always been interested in community development (opensource and otherwise) and in particular what happens when communities are “tested”. That’s happening right now in Vancouver where there are two Ruby / Rails “user groups”. One was started by Nathaniel Brown (“VanRuby”), the other by Zed Shaw and Jeremy Hubert (“Vancouver Ruby Brigade”). Gerald Bauer has called Nathaniel out with an open letter that gets right down to business:

Your ‘community’ sites seem only setup not to help and serve the local community but – if I dare to say – to promote your Rails workshops and conferences and drum up some business for yourself. — Gerald Bauer

Oh my! That’s going to get a response, huh? And it did. The resulting discussion is playing out on the mailing list , and it’s pretty fascinating. People got angry, accusations got tossed about, and things were looking pretty bleak. But then Miles called for a CTRL-C, and Peter stepped up with a nice little message and an offer to take the lead on a fresh start:

But if there’s too much politics associated with everything that has happened so far, this can be viewed as a new, neutral beginning. I’m not trying to exclude anyone. I just want to meet fellow Ruby/Rails programmers, drink beer, talk geeky things that my wife doesn’t appreciate and see the occasional interesting presentation … I am volunteering to do the boring organizational crap (starting with paying for the Meetup group and bringing a projector) that needs to happen in my opinion. This kind of stuff is no fun, but someone has to do it. I have already profited a ton from Ruby & Rails, so this is my way of giving back. — Peter Armstrong

Building communities around opensource projects is no easy task. There’s a lot of varying personalities and ideologies at play, and as such there are high points and low points. Things can be pretty unpredictable. For me the true litmus test of any community is how it rebounds from lows. If today is any indication my local Ruby community has certainly got its share of “interesting” personalities that can shake things up, but that’s ok because we also have the counter-balancing personalities that come up with creative alternatives, like the Vancouver Ruby/Rails Meetup Group!

Anyhow, the whole exchange hit close to home since Joyent is built on, and we in turn build, opensource software. Building communities around our projects, and getting even more involved in other opensource projects we believe in is something that’s priority #1 for us. It got me thinking about what really makes open source communities succeed. There’s a lot that’s been said about this, of course, but really it boils down to one thing: It’s got to be fun. Really. That’s it. Once I realized that, my anxiety about projects we’re involved in vanished. Why? Because if there’s one thing Joyeurs know how to do well, it’s have fun!