the nature of low-bandwidth communication on the internet probably just exposes you to misunderstandings and you end up stressing out over things vs being the friends you normally would.

it dwindled in activity even as it swelled in population

While I’d struggle to tell you how I learn best, there is one question that I’d always be able to answer enthusiastically: What would you like to learn next? Right now I’m learning JavaScript and have plans to give Spanish another go. I should probably pick up those guitar lessons again soon as well. Thankfully we live in a time when it’s trivially easy to gain access to resources and to learning activities. The problem is finding out the ones that work best for you. Perhaps that’s why we carry around in our pockets devices that can access pretty much the sum total of human knowledge yet use them to LOL at amusing pictures of cats. What are the barriers here? I’d suggest there are three main ones: 1 Curriculum - the series of activities that build towards a learning goal 2 Credentials - the ability to show what you know 3 Community - the cohort of peers you feel you are part of, along with access to ‘experts’

community development should be part of your open source project’s regular duties

At Twitter, our open source program has a team of developer advocates focused on growing open source ecosystems which are important for us to ensure they thrive and evolve to our benefit.

hosting events, speaking at conferences, reaching out to contributors, writing documentation to lower the barrier of entry to new contributors

Borrowing stuff from local businesses and residents creates trust; nailing and painting together creates community. If you have the luxury of buying, you create neither of these.

Collaborate for God's sake!: EVERY organization dealing with data is dealing with these problems. And governments need to work together on this. This is where open source presents invaluable process lessons for government: working collaboratively, and in the open, can float all boats much higher than they currently are. Whether it's putting your scripts on GitHub, asking and answering questions on the Open Data StackExchange, or helping out others on the Socrata support forums, collaboration is a key lever for this government technology problem.

For an economy and community to be successful, the participants need to believe in it. If no one believes in the community that brings them together, it fails.

There is an important connection here in which imagination and opportunity are close friends. Imagination offers the mind a vision of how things could be. If there is a viable path toward this future, we build a sense of opportunity. If there is no viable path, we enter the world of fantasy.

Community is a funny beast. Most people—the kind who watch talent shows on television and occasionally dip bread in oil in an expensive restaurant—don’t understand people like Neil. Why on earth would this guy decide to open his home, free of charge, to a collection of strangers who met on the Internet? Why would he want to spend an evening drinking tea and making jokes about something called “Emacs”?

THE ART OF

When I look at the DevOps “community” today, what I generally see is a near-total lack of overlap between people who started on the dev side and on the ops side.

The tie that binds us to our ancestors is that both ancient and digital-age humans crave community—and all the things that make community possible: survival, effective communication, cultural stability, purposeful education for our children, and creative expression.

Community and culture, Rembetsy asserts in the talk, is the foundation of any company. And how does one go about fostering community and encouraging positive culture? You begin by eliminating barriers, getting rid of silos, and encouraging collaboration across the entire company.