
CouchDB retrospective - bhaisaab
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/tumbolia/Sl6O0s8GS3s
======
grey-area
_I love CouchDB, but I love the CouchDB community even more. I think we made
the important decision to cultivate community right from the start. One of the
key components in getting that right turns out to be the concept of a
community gatekeeper, or steward. Someone to guide things back in the right
direction when they get off-track. Someone to set an example. On the very few
occasions someone has threatened the atmosphere on the lists and in the IRC
channel, it has been nice to see people defend it with passion and with
humility. When those people see how things work here, and how committed we are
to keeping the grass green and not letting the project become mired by useless
arguments and petty aggression, they either adjust or they leave._

Perhaps rather than producing wisdom, crowds encourage demagogy, regurgitation
of home truths, and petty agression/pedantry unless they are encouraged to
channel their energy in other directions. The contention is that they are
never self-regulating (even if you give them the tools to do so), but require
intervention and moderation to remain cohesive, productive communities.

Some interesting lessons in here for communities like HN/SO/Reddit/SD etc.
which rely on crowd moderation and technical measures to try to guide a
community. When dealing with a large enough community, that can break down as
enough new members arrive to subsume the older culture completely in a small
amount of time, and any technical measure you think of can be subverted by
those willing to put in the time to do so. I think reddit's approach here of
splitting the community up into smaller niche groups is really interesting,
but IMO they arrived at it too late to save their community overall.

~~~
kijin
> _I think reddit's approach here of splitting the community up into smaller
> niche groups is really interesting, but IMO they arrived at it too late to
> save their community overall._

But does the "community overall" need any saving?

The only things that keep reddit together as a nominal community are the
crappy, spammy, default subreddits. If not for those subreddits, there would
be little overlap between those who subscribe to CS subreddits and those who
subscribe to cooking or literature or photography subreddits. In other words,
all the good stuff is already highly fragmented, and reddit as a whole is a
"community" only in the sense that it's under the same domain name.

I wouldn't miss much if reddit's "community overall" simply disintegrated in
favor of even more fragmentation. What's wrong with having a million and five
communities instead of one, if small and mid-sized communities in fact work
better than large ones? Crowdsourcing might work best at a certain size and
level of engagement, and the optimal size might be smaller than what your
company's CFO wants you to believe. Yeah, it's not easy for an online business
nowadays to make a neat profit unless they command a humongous "community".
But the sweet thing about ASF is that they don't depend on having a lot of
people see ads on their website, so they can optimize for effective community
governance.

~~~
lbotos
I personally think one of the benefits of reddit is the fact that you have
access to essentially unlimited forums with the same identity. Oftentimes I am
working/pondering something and I'd like to ask someone involved in that
specific community a question. Without a "reddit-style" identity system (I
know there are "security concerns", etc) it looks like I need another username
and password for this niche phpbb forum. I think the reddit community lowers
the barrier of online discussion to a degree that if I wanted to I'm one post
away from hopping to another niche community to ask a question.

~~~
kijin
Yep, I like the idea of reddit-style online identity. It's almost effortless
to create dozens of them, you can use them in any subreddit, and you don't
even need an e-mail address to sign up.

Hopefully, if & when everyone starts using Persona, it will be nearly as
simple to start using a random website as it is to join a random subreddit,
and we will finally be able to stop being members of excessively large
"communities" like reddit and fb.

------
rkalla
FWIW, this was written in July of 2010 (2+ years ago) -- CouchDB is in a very
different place now than it was then.

Reading the mailing lists of CouchDB, Redis, MongoDB and Cassandra are _very_
different experiences.

CouchDB's list reads like 10 or so of the same people discussing very high
level efforts like documentation and Windows builds, developing the DB at a
glacial pace -- including merging in changes from all the spin-off CouchDB
efforts that all seem to be defunct now (e.g. BigCouch and the sharding code).

Tangentially, MongoDB/Redis/Cassandra mailing lists are _NOTHING_ but "How do
I..." questions, deployment questions, feature development questions, patch
submissions, etc. (more-so Cassandra and MongoDB lists).

CouchDB to me has found this life that feels very academic to me which I think
is a good thing in the long-term for the project. The principles are in no
rush to get to features and have the motto "slow and consistent wins the
race". I would be surprised at all if a few years go by and then CouchDB gets
rediscovered suddenly as the panacea to everything (something akin to how
Jetty suddenly became hot business in the Java server world after being mostly
ignored for 10 years)

With the money behind Cassandra and Mongo it is probably not much of a
surprise that there are much more new deployments going on and Redis has found
a place somewhere between the two with what I would say is a Linus-like
steward at the helm (props to Salvatorefor being everything that is right with
open-source)

I wouldn't build a commercial product on CouchDB tomorrow, but I am eagerly
waiting to see where it goes in the next year. It is wonderfully designed, but
I'd like to see some of the nagging "table stakes" issues like replication
failures fixed before caring about Feature XYZ and release 2.0

~~~
georgemcbay
I'm not much of a CouchDB user (though I've played around with it a bit), but
I would assume that at least part of the reason CouchDB's mailing list is so
quiet is due to the rather public split of the community brought upon by the
introduction of Couchbase.

Couchbase's forums have much the same sort of "How do I" questions you are
talking about seeing on the other project's mailing lists.

------
smegel
Misleading headline, this is about CouchDB and only tangentially ASF.

~~~
bhaisaab
Couch is ASF project, ASF is sum of all its committers, so...

~~~
smegel
When submitting links in future you should probably just stick with the
original blog title, which in this case was "CouchDB retrospective" - a
succinct and accurate representation of the actual topic being blogged about.

~~~
bhaisaab
Alright, I intended to post this:
<http://intertwingly.net/blog/2010/07/18/Community-over-Code>

which is about the link I posted, so...

~~~
Evbn
Which has an unclosable popup ad for its onsite, covering most of the content.

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jacques_chester
Well that was nice.

... um.

Now what?

