OSGeo Communication Overload
After our initial Feb 4th meeting, things have been happening quickly. In fact, I think one of our biggest hurdles is that we are running up against Brook’s Law, ie communication costs increase with the square of the number of participants. Many folks are talking about many things all at once. The amount of brain and network bandwidth required to follow everything has been pretty daunting. An daily inbox with a 100+ messages related to OSGeo is a significant commitment just by itself.
One concern that I have is organizationally whether or not OSGeo has the potential to wither under the weight of the communication load. A corporation has the nice advantage of being hierarchical, for better or worse. OSGeo is a “by consensus” organization, but democracy is expensive from a communcation perspective. In the intial bootstrapping, lots of communication cost is placed on the board and many consensus decisions must be made by it.
Getting there (wherever we define “there” to be) is going to be challenging and a lot of work for the board. The board is working to delegate to various committees within OSGeo, but geometric growth of committees only increases the number of things clammoring for their attention. Add in many projects individually chirping for attention, and things can start to get out of hand.
It is my hope that after the mad rush, things start to settle down into a less hectic mode. Part of this rush is finding out what organizational structure works the best for us, as we are attempting something that hasn’t really been done before (take a bunch of open source software projects under different licenses and bring them under one tent). We’re learning though. Openly.