Opensource is a powerful thing. This whole blog is powered by the works of minds of various highly intelligent individuals who've locked together to work on topics of similar interests. I love the concept of such a community. A community where at any time there is a group of people really passionate, motivated and willing to achieve a like-minded goal in their spare time as a hobby.. for free. Imagine if this could be replicated in a work environment! Many people putting their hands together saying "I want to get involved with that" to solve a problem that is of interest to them! I'd bet they'd fine a way of fixing it and probably a damn good way in that. I get the impression in some ways Google work like this, and that's probably why they are seen as such as attractive company to millions of people.

Unfortunately businesses don't work like this. Usually they consist of hand picked people put in jobs, some of whom care about the impact of the work, some of them whom are mainly interested in their own personal career progression and how much money they can make out of it and how they can spin it on their CV.

I had a session at work today where we learnt about the life of one of my employees senior managers. It was interesting as from his chat, it seemed to me that he had got where he was today by doing something outside his job role. Something he believed in. He and a single colleague friend had made a billing system on a computer that at the time was groundbreaking. It had taken him 6 months, and this embarrassed some of his colleagues who the traditional way had been trying to create one in 2 years without an end product. Perfect example of how the "open source approach" is better than our traditional ways of working.

Without wanting to generalise or offend anyone, I'd bet this manager documentedd their work quite casually initially (because that's the boring bit right?!) whereas that group of workers who had spent 2 years probably created pages and pages of worthless documentation that no-one will ever read.

Even though I'm a big fan of opensource, I'm not an active participant of the opensource community and I'll tell you why.. put simply I find it so inaccessible. Firstly I get the impression that the people in it appear are much more intelligent then me and I feel I will get laughed down with my newbie questions. I also wouldn't know where to start... it just has this aura of an exclusive club where you have to be invited in. I'm sure this is not the case, but I just don't know how I get in. And when I recently found opensource projects on for example sourgefource, despite knowing what this opensource software could do, I had no idea where to start in the code, no documentation to refer to. I just had to play around with it hoping I could get it to do what I wanted. It was like going to Ikea, getting lots of planks of wood and being expected through trial and error to work out how it makes a desk. Not impossible but unnecessarily hard. And when there is documentation it's usually in a format I need to analyse for long periods of time before I understand. All I want is a simple getting started tour. Take a house analogy.. the house being the open source with all it's furniture and utilities functions, I want a quick guide showing me what everything does, so that I don't end up trying to toast bread in the washing machine or even worse pissing in someone's bedroom sink because I mistook it for the toilet. Once I know what that washing machine does, I might not know how but at least I've got a good headstart!