Open Source as tribal paradigm

When we hear the words tribe or tribal, we probably think about an undeveloped society that rarely exists in today's world.  A throw back to our "hunter - gatherer" days.

More and more scholars and thinkers are re-examining tribes and how they may still be part of society and how those behaviours affect our interactions with each other.

In a way, any group of people with some common interest or need to relate is a tribe.  We have different names for this behaviour:  club, team, special interest group, co-op, or even clique.  What ever the name, there is a social drive to form and maintain this tribe.

So how is thinking of tribes important to the idea of Open?

This idea is certainly not new, tribes have been with us from the beginning of societies.  In the later 1900's, we talked about "group think" or "synergy" and more recently we call it "collaboration".  The idea behind this is that as people and societies evolve, we find that the capability of a group is generally more than the sum of its parts.

There are many possible reasons for how tribes have been extremely beneficial, not least of which being for comfort and security.  It is well known in psychology that people who have a group of friends tends to be happier, and happier people have a tendency to be more productive.  And of course, in a group, more people being aware of the surroundings of a group are quicker and more effectively as a whole to react and act on a threat.

In a very entertaining Ted talk presentation, Derek Sivers described "How to start a movement".  It is a very simple, yet enlightening description of how groups form. 

The take away from this talk could be to show how spontaneously and quickly a tribe can form, how fragile they can be at the early stages, and then how they can eventually reach a stabilization point.

Of course, many similar talks about tribes has to do with leadership.  As Derek points out, the first person is not always the leader and as mentioned earlier, tribes don't necessarily form around a person, rather they form around an idea or belief.  And each person in the tribe provides their own, unique value to the tribe.  One of those values, one that helps congeal and stabilize a tribe, would be leadership.  We could come to a number of conclusions in the video above regarding who the leader was or ended up being.  The first person?  The second or third person?  If we watch to the end, we will see the tribe disband.  The reason is, the music stopped.  The tribe formed around a person, yet the idea itself was fragile.  The musicians themselves were also leaders within that tribe.

So in speaking further about the importance of tribal leadership, Seth Godin speaks further about "The Tribes we Lead" in another Ted talk.  We may have a primary tribe, but within those tribes we may have sub tribes and we may also be part of more than one, unique tribe.  In Godin's talk, he describes not just about how Tribes form around ideas, but that in order to keep a tribe viable, there needs to be a leader or leaders who continually works on reminding those in the tribe, why the tribe exists, and also spreading the tribal ideas to others to gain more opportunity.

In another Ted talk, David Logan speaks about tribes and to these underlying ideas of how people get together and operate and the stages in which they exist.  From the early, possibly chaotic, fragile, and dangerously disruptive stages, to the middle stages of status quo and comfortable, to the highest stages of amazing growth and accomplishment.  How we recognize the tribe stages and help loft them to higher, more benign, yet positive stages is a benefit not just to the tribe itself, but to all things.

So what does this have to do with Open, or Open Source?

Well, this really is about a tribe, based on an idea or ideal.  It might be that ideas themselves should be shared.  It might be to help others survive or thrive.  It might be to put an idea out there for others to work on, so that we get back better results because more people working on a problem may produce results faster or of much greater value than we could produce on our own.  And of course, these groups really are about benefiting at least the individuals and the tribe itself, but more often, really successful tribes seem to provide great benefits to people and things outside themselves.

So what idea do you have, that you might find or form a tribe around?