Open Source Enterprise Community

July 18th, 2010Geek, Work 2 Comments

Recently been thinking, that if there is one thing that Open Source Community do really well is collaboration, and building community. Something that very few ‘Enterprise’ places do really well.

Considering why can’t an Enterprise do that, why can’t they? Is the question I am asking.

If I was starting a Open Source Project outside of work, I would be working the online community, frequenting IRC Channels, Mailing Lists, and Blogs of related projects. Announcing my new project and gathering a team around that.

Things like that just don’t seem to happen in Enterprise, sure there are no IRC Channels, or Mailing Lists. I guess the equivalent are teams, both support and project specific. To but in on those would be difficult.

Why can’t we do it?

2 Responses to “Open Source Enterprise Community”

  1. mrben Says:
    July 20th, 2010 at 10:44 am

    Certainly the Enterprise I used to work for _did_ have mailing lists and forums internally for open source projects.

    However, most Enterprises don’t understand community, particularly the variant of community that exists in the open source arena.

  2. MatthewJohnRitchie Says:
    August 16th, 2011 at 9:20 pm

    I have been thinking the exact same thing….

    I am attempting to set up an enterprise where there are zero EMPLOYEES but rather investors of time more so over finance.

    I.e. if the founder is willing to never take a salery then other contributors i.e. whole salers, resellers, programmers etc the whole gammet never takes a salery.

    However, as investors everyone will be an investor of some sort and will see a rise in their share as the enterprise grows, like a co-operative, but where the dividend is paid say quarterly or monthly depending on profits.

    The key would be that anyone can work on behalf of the enterprise but they must be able to sell via putting the word out about products. This way a MultiLevelMarketing mechanism can be used to record performance which then relates to added benifits on payday so to speek.

    I imagine it to work a bit like Amazon, Ebay, E-Sources, etc with flavours of each rolled together. The whole enterprise will work under one payment gateway mechanism as a standard, unlike the source code for OSCommerce which provides for umpteen gateway payment solutions.

    I am also thinking of rolling a mechanism into the enterprise that replaces the shaky pensions pot system by including the idea of The Infinate Banking Concept rolled together with Peer-to-Peer Lending.

    Progress so far is still in the reading of the Drupal API, as I think this provides the base security and structure I have been looking for the last 5 years. So far I was trying to hardcode hack the OSCommerce sopping cart to do what I wanted, I.e. build an API, have user roles etc etc etc But discovered 4 years in that there were weaknesses in the package that allowed a worm to muck up my development site 3 times before I found the issues that sould have been highlighted when I installed the code!!!!!!!

    This time round I am thinking drupal and the first book I am reading is the SECURITY book!!!

    I have a mini wiki on my site with my ideas etc which are changing quicker than I can update the wiki pages hence its static look for the last few months. there are other artickes now hidden but still accessable in the back ground through some still existant links….

    Have a poke around and let me know your thoughts

    Matthew John Ritchie.

    OpenEnterpriseCommunity
    OpenEnterpriseMarketplace

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