Let’s Talk with David Eaves, Part II

In the second part of my conversation with David Eaves, an open data, open source and open government advocate, we continue to discuss issues of communication as they relate to shaping open source communities.

JI: How do we create communities in which geographical boundaries aren’t as important?

DE: Whenever you’re communicating with somebody, that communication can be broken down into three parts. There’s the actual meaning of the words, which only counts for roughly 10 percent of the communication. Then there’s the tone: does my voice go up? Am I angry sounding or happy sounding? That makes up for like another 15 to 20 percent of the conversation, what’s known as intent. And then the rest is all body language. So one of the problems we have now is, when you’re on the phone, you lose all the body language, or 60% of the communication. When you move to Bugzilla, you’re losing like 90%. So, we actually have to be way more skilled in how we’re working together. Part of this is building personal skills, part of it is building prompts into the software that force us to do things that come naturally when we come face to face. I don’t think anybody’s thinking about this problem in a systematic way, and that’s where I’m trying to go.

When you think about the open-source space, when you first go into an open source project, you probably lurk for a while. You do the odd patch here or the odd patch there. But as you get more senior, especially in a big project, you spend less and less of your time coding. And really, what I think is interesting is that the people who are senior in a project, what they’re really doing is communicating and negotiating. They’re stick-handling problems, they’re helping people communicate.

JI: Is that the essential difference between management and being a more traditional employee? The idea of a manager taking a larger overview and directing everybody’s contributions?

DE: Unlike a traditional organization, you can’t really direct people on open source the way management can. It’s a lot more negotiating than it is managing.

This article is continued.