Companies face a constant challenge to introduce new people to Open Source. Employees who are familiar with open source need to communicate their skill and know-how about OSS communities and practices in an effort to train the next generation of contributors. However, because OSS communities have their own history and unwritten rules, it is difficult for newcomers to understand the behaviors of community members.
As a relative newcomer to Open Source, I would like to share my perspective on how companies' and individual's activities relate to common sense and a shared understanding that is part of involvement in OSS communities.
I will present a categorization of human activity from sociology, dividing activity into 3 categories: Labor, Work and Action. I will describe each of these, and explain where OSS activities fit in this categorization. Also, I will discuss the shared understanding, critical in Open Source projects, which allows individuals to predict the behaviors of others, and know how to act themselves within OSS communities. This session is intended to present my own thoughts on Open Source, and allow attendees to share insights from their own experience on how to transfer knowledge from one generation of Open Source participants to the next.
