As a follow-up on the post I did about Apple and whether or not they did community-driven development too, I did some more research and came across an interesting article by Johan Füller, Michael Bartl, Holger Ernst and Hans Mühlbacher. The paper titles Community Based Innovation: How to Integrate Members of Virtual Communities into New Product Development is an interesting essay about the ideas behind using a community larger than just the people employed by a company into the development of new products.
Obviously open source development is a very good example of integrating virtual (or online) communities into the development of new products. Using online communities of developers looking at your products all the time (by testing them, criticizing them, getting feature requests out there and advocating the products) open source projects such as Linux, Apache and also Spring have effectively used techniques described in the paper to get to better products.
The paper takes an interesting view point: using various case studies of for example Procter and Gamble and Audi they show how traditional companies have applied the ideas of community based innovation to the development of products other than software.
It’s interesting to look at open source development from this angle. What’s important about open source development: is it the fact about the source being open, or is it the idea of communities being involved in the development and as a result of that making software better? To my mind, the fact that the communities are involved in the development of the products from the early start makes the software better, leads to lesser bugs and better customer (developer) satisfaction. Sure, the fact that the source is open is important to a certain extent. After all, our clients are developers too and using their skills to not only look at the products as a black box, but also allowing them to look inside is a very good way of getting people more involved. The community aspect however is what’s most important to me.
What I’m asking myself currently is how many open source communities really realize this. How much do they know that the community is what makes their products better than proprietary software. How (pro)actively are they involving communities into the development of the product. The paper offers some interesting insight into how traditional companies did this and maybe the open source communities could learn something from this. Highly recommended reading material for any open source developer that looks beyond just delivering code.
What do you think?
