Social Architecture: Building On-line Communities by Pieter Hintjens

Author:Pieter Hintjens [Hintjens, Pieter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pieter Hintjens
Published: 2016-05-05T04:00:00+00:00

Crazy, Beautiful, and Easy

You need a goal that's crazy and simple enough to get people out of bed in the morning. Your community has to attract the very best people and that demands something special. With ZeroMQ, we said we were going to make "the Fastest. Messaging. Ever.", which qualifies as a good motivator. If we'd said, we're going to make "a smart transport layer that'll connect your moving pieces cheaply and flexibly across your enterprise", we'd have failed.

Then your work must be beautiful, immediately useful, and attractive. Your contributors are users who want to explore just a little beyond where they are now. Make it simple, elegant, and brutally clean. The experience when people run or use your work should be an emotional one. They should feel something, and if you accurately solved even just one big problem that until then they didn't quite realize they faced, you'll have a small part of their soul.

It must be easy to understand, use, and join. Too many projects have barriers to access: put yourself in the other person's mind and see all the reasons they come to your site, thinking "Um, interesting project, but..." and then leave. You want them to stay and try it, just once. Use GitHub and put the issue tracker right there.

If you do these things well, your community will be smart but more importantly, it will be intellectually and geographically diverse. This is really important. A group of like-minded experts cannot explore the problem landscape well. They tend to make big mistakes. Diversity beats education any time.

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