Communities and Git

The conversation that has sprung up around how the use of distributed version control, Github in particular, affects community is a refreshing change in the blogosphere1. It’s people collectively thinking things through rather than just reacting in uproar or following the latest meme.

The latest installment is from Ben Hyde, git: Balene for Knowledge2. It’s definitely worth reading in its entirety, but let me pull out a couple of key points:

[Source control] provides a locus around which the work can rendezvous. It a campfire, and the community gathers around it. I accept that. But let’s be clear, it isn’t the only campfire. Other examples: the irc channel, the email, the bug tracking, the release process, the distribution system, the license, the social networks, etc. etc. and:

The thing that blew me away about git was that it helps to address this problem. It increases the probability that users will reveal their knowledge. It helps to create a cultural norm toward that behavior. To me this is far more important than the risk that their forking would quench the community campfire. The thing that really strikes me about these two comments – GitHub doesn’t just provide forks with a git branch to work on, it also provides a wiki and issue tracker. It does keep track of the network and provide tools to help feed changes back and they do work well, but it unconditionally forks more than just the source control.

So perhaps one improvement GitHub could make is to enable a project to be forked without creating the wiki, issue tracker etc. Not only would that make it clearer that this was just an experimental or temporary fork rather than an alternate, long term project, it would further reduce the barrier to people getting involved. Right now, creating a fork means creating a whole open source project and it feels like you should be managing it as a project which feels like hard work. If you only forked the source control, it would just be a place to code out in the open so that you can get what you need from the project but also make it easily available to everyone else.

1 – wow that really feels like a blast from the past…↩

2 – in response to J Aaron Farr’s A Community of Rockstars which amusingly is part of the latest uproar. ↩