How community happens

My friend Ben Collins-Sussman illustrated — just last night — one of the key tools of building and maintaining community in an open- or inner-source world: open-source conversations about open-source relations.  And boy, this source is really open!  As I write this, the post has been up for about twelve hours, and there are 37 comments: around three an hour, in the middle of the night, for a personal blog that spends as much time talking about exotic musical instruments and canned tuna as it does programming topics!

Banjos and tuna may be non sequiturs, but they’re just the sort of human voice a community needs, to establish the relationships that allow challenging insights about programmer psychology, tool use, and proper practices.