We in the technology world often feel that what we're doing is *so* new, we don't have anything to learn from those who went before. And yet, wherever we look, we catch glimpses of wisdom learned in the past which can be applied to open source software development. Dave presents examples from three areas: city planning, architecture and diplomacy, and shows how they apply to the open source world.

1. The Ecclesiastes principle
Learning the lessons
of the past
Dave Neary, Red Hat
dneary@redhat.com / @nearyd

2. Ecclesiastes 1:9
What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.

3. The Great Frontier

5. 3 examples
Architecture
City planning
Diplomacy

11. Community intimacy gradient
●
Public: Forum, public mailing list, ...
●
Semi-public: IRC, blog comments, ...
●
●
Semi-private: Moderated mailing list,
invitation-only IRC channel, BOFs/meetups, ...
Private: Private email, phone, face to face

13. Mixed
Uses

14. Professional
Amateur

18. The projects that have
been the most
successful... are good
at all sorts of “soft
skills”
David Eaves

19. Harvard Negotiation Project
●
●
Founded in 1970s
Been used in international peace negotiations,
business negotiations, ...

20. A typical “negotiation”
I'll give you 40
for it
40? It cost me
more! I'll give it to
you for 70.
You're joking!
I'll give you 50, not
a penny more!
You're a good
customer, I could go to 60,
not a penny less
I can go to 53,
but that's all the cash I have
with me

21. Negotiation overview
Relationship
Communication
Interests
Discussion
space
Options
Legitimacy

22. Negotiations in Open Source
●
Mailing list discussions
●
Bug report closed as “Not a bug” and reopened
●
Patch review
●
Feature priority
●
Conflict resolution

23. Thank you!
Photo credits:
Slide 1: CC by-sa 2.0 by doratagold on Flickr
Slide 3: Public domain
Slides 6-8: “A Pattern Language”, Alexander et al
Slide 12: “The Death and Life if Great American Cities”, Jacobs
Slide 13: CC by-sa 3.0 by revizionist on Wikipedia
Slide 15: Public domain
Slide 16: CC by 2.0. Pencil by taylor.a on flickr, Cassette by victoradrianramia on flickr
Slide 18: © David Eaves