Leading Open Source-Style Collaboration

The first a-ha from the round table by Iwata and Umeda had to do with the gap between the possibilities and what one can physically do. The second one has to do with how open source collaboration works.

Umeda has been studying about open source collaboration and his insights about successful open source collaboration are:

• Individuals starting to program something do it because they just want to make things easier for them or fix/create something
• The starter communicates the vision and keeps his/her progress open to the world
• When problems or challenges surface, others become compelled to help - not because they want to help him per se, but because it makes them feel that they can solve the problem
• The community will stay involved as long as these challenges are being generated by this initiative

He points out the interesting phenomena that the neigher starter nor his community are thinking about doing something for others - they do what they do because it's interesting and it seems challenging enough for them for solve. And Iwata, who is the CEO of Nintendo, describes how similar the environment was when they developed Wii. They further discuss how this may be a form of new leadership in this era.

I was fascinated. If you have an issue you want to tackle, you could potentially get a very large crowd involved via the Internet to solve it. And even if that was just for yourself, it could benefit many others in the end. You have to have a clear direction and vision as to what you want to accomplish and perhaps present it in a way that interests others, but people don't always need to be compensated or be wanting to help you - there are people who solve the problem because there's a problem (Umeda says it's like solving crossword puzzle on the newspaper - people do it for fun).

Maybe this is how I need to work on my life mission.