Today, the OSA announced its newly elected board, along with its interoperability roadmap and projects that are currently underways. This roadmap is a work-in-progress, but already represents a great deal of effort that has gone into ascertaining the common interoperability challenges that our customers face. (And I really mean “our” customers – What we have heard over and over again is that these are common issues, and not unique to specific products or specific vendors.)
In addition, there are many other activities ongoing within the OSA, including planning for various developer activities, business customer outreach events, new interoperability projects, and so forth. Indeed, the last three weeks since our board election has seen a tremendous burst of activity, along with the joining of several new members to the organization.
With so many activities, and so many new members, we have had to put careful thought into governance. We intend the OSA to be a true community, with each member contributing meaningful time, expertise and thought leadership of their own choosing, but meanwhile, all this activity needs to “roll up” to the success of the OSA’s mission. How to balance between top-down “management” that can crimp innovation and self-motivated participation, while avoiding a free-for-all where nobody is minding the budgets and overall strategic objectives? How to do this is an interesting challenge, and is a great case study in community development.
The answer relies on why the OSA exists in the first place. All of us believe that open, collaborative behavior will consistently deliver superior results compared to closed, proprietary behavior. This worked for Linux and Apache, and is starting to work for products “higher up the stack” such as databases, CRM and Enterprise Content Management. But the OSA isn’t simply another community of developers. We are a community of both developers and organizations, including both pure open source projects and all the commercial open source “hybrids” that have evolved in recent years. (By the way,
Dan Farber recently wrote an excellent blog posting on exactly this topic.) Just like developers around the world can collaborate on solving problems that they have a common interest in solving, we believe that organizations can collaborate in the same ways, as long as they are aligned on common interests. The problems may differ (interoperability, “mainstream” customer advocacy, and so forth) but the guiding principle is the same – Open collective action will consistently deliver superior results than unilateral behavior when addressing shared problems.
The OSA exists to facilitate this collaborative behavior. Think of this as taking the notion of “community” to the next level, borrowing the ideas of open collaboration from the world of individual-contributing developers, to the world of organizations. This, then, forms the basis of our governing philosophy.
The fact that many of these organizations are “hybrids” led us to take a page out of their book. Our governing model is itself a “hybrid” of bottom-up decentralized member innovations and contributions, and top-down strategic alignment and sticking to budgets, and consists of the following organizational best practices:
TOP-DOWN:
First, the OSA is divided into “working groups”, each focusing on various strategic aspects of the OSA’s mission. Currently, these consist of Marketing, Interoperability and Community Development. The OSA’s board has appointed strong Officers from its member pool to lead these working groups. We look to those officers to act independently to drive strategy and priorities in their respective areas. As part of this:
1. Working group leads are encouraged to be the “public faces” to media and analysts, when promoting their respective areas.
2. Working group leads are encouraged to “divide and conquer” within their groups. This is already happening in the Marketing group (dividing activities into four sub-groups focusing on Media/Analyst relations, Business Customer outreach, Developer outreach, Member recruitment and onboarding) and the Interoperability group (task forces are being set up for each interoperability proposal).
3. Budget is carved out for each working group, depending on the priorities and current pipeline of activities in place at the time. Budgets can be adjusted based on member recruitment (i.e. member dues) and other potential sources of cash flow, as well as ad hoc ideas and proposals from the membership.
4. Working group leads are encouraged to manage collaboration within their groups, including setting up conference calls, using collaboration tools such as wikis, and so forth.
5. Given all this, working group leads are encouraged to act as “stewards”, acting as enablers instead of drivers of the bottom-up behavior described below:
BOTTOM-UP:
1. Each member is encouraged to drive activities that are relevant to their core competencies, including being the “public face” for those activities. These can include specific interoperability proposals or prototypes, specific marketing activities, and so forth. For example, Unisys taking the lead on the common-customer-view prototype, Palamida is driving awareness around compliance issues, TOSTA is helping organize customer forums, Hyperic taking the lead on certain production monitoring best practices, and so forth.
2. Each such activity should be aligned with at least one working group, so each member should reach out to the working group lead as needed to secure budget and other OSA resources (such as trade show sponsorships, and so forth). Working group leads should provide guidance for what that working group needs to accomplish, while being open to new ideas and proposed initiatives from each of the members.
3. Upon joining, each new member is encouraged to champion one or more initiatives that matter to them. In other words, identify the proverbial “itch that needs to be scratched”. For similar reasons that a developer chooses to contribute to an open source project, an OSA member chooses to contribute their time and resources to a challenge that faces their business, and believes it can best solve through collective action. By identifying this up front, each member feels they have a stake, something important to focus on, and be welcomed and respected by the OSA membership as a thought leader in that area.
In Closing:
The results so far have been promising. Each member feels a sense of collective ownership, while leading specific initiatives that matter to them. This hasn’t been without challenge… We are not immune to the problems of communicating and coordinating across a large and diverse group of people. But the advantage of open-ness and collaborative spirit is that it creates a climate of proactively sharing information and ideas, and discouraging the knowledge-hoarding which tends to happen in closed, unilateral organizations. And, by making our own day to day operations publicly visible, the OSA seeks to avoid the same syndrome, so we can truly represent the interests of the industry instead of a select few members.
