--:-- Sonal Choksi: While community is a concept that intersects with many tech trends and innovations today, community has long played a role in the modern open source movement. What can we learn from the evolution of open source communities, and how might that be applied to online communities and the creator economy today?
--:-- Sonal Choksi: In this episode from August 2020, author Nadia Asparohov, who previously published under the name Nadia Iqbal, comes on the show to discuss her book, *Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software*. Nadia and host Sonal Choksi go through a taxonomy for communities, how open source has changed over time, which learnings from open source do and don't apply to new communities, and more.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the a16z podcast. I'm Sonal, and I'm super excited to do one of our special book launch episodes for the new book coming out just this week, *Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software* by Nadia Iqbal, published by Stripe Press.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: The topic actually applies to all kinds of communities and groups coming together, whether it's an open source project, an R&D initiative, a department in a company, a club or a special interest group, even a group of friends and family. It's all about how people come together to coordinate and collaborate around some shared interest or activity, whether participatory or not, whether code or content. One theme we also pull the threads on in this episode is about how the learnings of open source communities do and don't apply to the passion economy and creator communities as well.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: Nadia has long been immersed in studying the health of communities, including getting funding from the Ford Foundation to study open source, then worked at GitHub in developer experience, then did research at Protocol Labs, and is now focused on writer experience at Substack. For longtime listeners of the a16z podcast, I've actually had her on the show years ago, along with Michael Rogers of Protocol Labs, then of the Node.js Foundation, where we talked about the changing culture of open source. You can find that episode on our site.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: In this wide-ranging hallway-style episode, Nadia and I cover everything from types of communities, social networks, and the evolution of being online. Ironically, while the book is called *Working in Public*, we also talk about the emergence of private spaces, as well as the tragedy of big public commons and how to counter the tragedy of the commons. I believe everyone should read this book, because there's a dearth of literature out there for the era of unprecedented online collaboration, creation, and consumption that we're in.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: We end with some quick practical advice for community managers, platforms, and leaders, but we began by quickly defining open source in this context with a really useful taxonomy for categorizing communities.
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: You know, early on, I was just like, oh, I really hate this term. I just wish we could go with something else like "public software" or whatever.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: I love that. I love it too. Unfortunately, it's pretty hard to change terms that everyone else agrees on. I know this firsthand.
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: I personally find the term kind of intimidating. It doesn't sound exciting when I say the term "open source." But it really does just refer to the distribution side of code. The existence of open source licenses made it very easy for anyone to use, modify, and republish someone else's code and put it in their own software. But it doesn't really say a whole lot about how open source is actually produced.
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: I make this analogy in the book, which I borrowed from my friend Devin. Devin Zuckel. She hosted a couple of podcasts for me.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: I love her. Yes. Yes. Yes.
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: She says something like, "The term open source doesn't mean anything any more than the term company does." Yes, we kind of get what a company is, but there are so many different kinds of business models for different types of companies. Similarly with open source, saying something is open source tells you a little bit about how the code might be used, but it doesn't really say anything about how they're actually being made. Someone has to continue taking care of it.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: One of my favorite parts of the book is how you actually outline different types of communities. You call it classifying project types, but it's really, to me, how people organize and essentially social networks. Why don't you break down that taxonomy? By the way, the reason I'm asking is because when I think of the arc and history of open source, the concept that comes to mind for everybody is that classic book by Eric Raymond, *The Cathedral and the Bazaar*. I think that framing has too long framed our discussion of open source and frankly, any online community.
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: Everyone sort of has this general understanding of what community is like: "Oh, there's a bunch of members and they're kind of organized around some common interests or a reason for spending time together." At that highest level definition of a community, there's an underlying assumption that all members are sort of similar. The term "members" washes over the underlying dynamics between those different members.
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: What I started by doing was saying, okay, there is a difference between, at minimum in open source, people who are contributing to open source and people who are using open source. I try to separate out users and contributors. In some open source projects, or really communities in general, some communities have high contributor growth and some communities have high user growth. There are different permutations of that: federations, clubs, stadiums, and toys.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: Tell me what those are. I think it's really useful to start with your taxonomy of federations and onward.
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: Federations are the really big open source projects we might be thinking of, like Linux or Wikipedia, where you have a lot of people who are contributing to the project and a lot of people who are using the project. There are enough people working on the creation of that project that it forms its own contributor community.
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: By contrast, clubs have a lot of people who are participating in its creation, but they don't have as many people who are using it. A project focused around a niche interest—the example I like to give is AstroPy, which is a Python library for astrophysicists. It's high contributor because they're incredibly interested in that, but very low user growth because how many people in the world are really interested in that intersection?
--:-- Sonal Choksi: Exactly.
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: Toys I sort of mentioned in passing, and they're probably the least interesting thing to talk about. That's where you have both low user and low contributor growth. That might just be a personal project. I'm tinkering around. No one else is really looking at it. They're sort of waiting in the wings before they become one of the other types of communities.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: Right.
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: The fourth model is stadiums. This is the one I think is most interesting and most overlooked because it's a newer phenomenon. This is a situation where you have one or maybe a couple of contributors, and you're making something for a very large audience of users. You can imagine someone standing in the middle of a stadium. There's an imbalance where the developer is fielding a lot of inbound requests, comments, issues, pull requests—a lot of needs from their users—but there aren't that many people who are actually able to help.
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: Contrast that to a federation like Linux, which is extremely widely used, but there's also a very mature and well-developed ecosystem of contributors to support it. A big part of this book is taking the time to stop and look a little more deeply at what is that giant audience of faceless users. Are there interesting dynamics happening there that actually make this look more like a community? A stadium is actually a legitimate type of community that stands alongside clubs and federations. We just haven't really taken the time to understand it before.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: I love that, Nadia. What I found fascinating about stadiums is you're essentially describing—and I think about this as someone who cares about content and social—the rise of an influencer. This is no different than influencer economies in many ways, where you have a star contributor and then a bunch of people in this stadium, literally in your analogy, watching them. You even say that it's this shift, and I think you're quoting someone, to "facing the stage versus facing each other."
--:-- Sonal Choksi: When you have this person who's on the stage and they're the primary contributor—let's just say creator, because we're essentially also talking about creator economies here—you made this distinction that they may be intertwined and influenced by their community around them, but they're not actually doing peer production in the classic collaborative way of the first eras of open source. Can you explain that a little bit and tell me more about why that's happening?
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: It definitely has this broader application to what's happening to individual creators on all these different social platforms today. Most open source projects used to be clubs. Not a lot of people were using open source in its earliest days. You had this group of weird developers who just loved using it and maintaining it for their own purpose. Eventually, we hit this point where open source became so popular that tons of people were discovering all these projects and using the code.
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: I attribute that in large part to the creation of a platform, GitHub, which united all these projects together and made them discoverable in one place with a much more standard way of contributing, discovering, and thinking about what open source is. For a lot of people, GitHub is basically synonymous with open source.
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: Another useful parallel trend is that open source projects started becoming a lot smaller due to platform effects. Different languages have package managers that made it really easy to find, discover, and use lots of different libraries. Now these projects are smaller. They have one developer at the helm, but they have 10x, 100x, 1000x more users coming in. Suddenly you go from having these clubs where everyone kind of knows each other—if you're using it, you're expected to contribute back if you need something instead of asking someone to do it for you—to having all these outsiders flooding into a project and using it.
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: At the same time, some portion of those users are now coming into the project and asking for things. They don't have the same background that the core developers, creators, or maintainers do. They're just asking for things and leaving.
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: A useful analogy might be thinking about a small town that was largely undiscovered, not connected to a highway. Once it became part of a highway system, you suddenly have all these tourists stopping by. It changes the nature of the entire town. In some tourist towns, more than half the population is actually tourists, not local residents. The extremes I often hear about are either "I'm just going to completely close off and do my own thing" or "I have to welcome everyone."
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: What I'm trying to suggest is there's something in the middle. It's okay to make things and share them in public, but it doesn't mean that everyone has to participate. That's a theme I really try to push on in this book: something being public does not mean that it has to be participatory.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: You actually shared a great analogy in your book where a Twitter user, before they become kind of famous or big, is very good about responding to people. They're building their community. It's very peer to peer. Then there was a point where some of them become even more influential and they're so overwhelmed by mentions, replies, and questions that they can't even remotely respond to any of it. I thought that was a very useful analogy for thinking about that evolution over time.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: You mentioned that there's this increasing modularity where people can take things and combine them. This really stood out to me because one of my absolute favorite themes for innovation and how people change the world is modularity. I have this joke of "modularize all the things." Let's talk about why that modularity matters. The example that we both know is modularity in the form of the Node package manager. Our mutual friend, Michael Rogers, ran much of the work in the Node.js community. Let's talk about how that shift has mattered.
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: On one end, you have very monolithic software where if you change one thing, it has a lot of implications for changing other things. Software projects that look like this tend to be a lot more thoughtful, deliberate, and slow about what they accept as a contribution or changes they want to make, because the whole thing is tightly coupled but also brittle in that way. It has a very different implication for how many contributions we actually accept and how much we can actually change things.
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: What happened when open source became a little more modularized—best exemplified in the story of NPM and JavaScript—is that instead of having this tightly coupled code, you can imagine a tower made out of Lego blocks. You can remove one of those blocks and the rest of the tower still stands. It completely changes how we think about a single piece of software. Instead of having to think about the major implications of changes between different parts of the code, you can say, "I'm going to grab lots of different components from different types of developers. I want this person's library and that other person's library," and just fine-tune it to look exactly how you want. As a result, it enabled a lot of new creation in open source.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: In the crypto world, the community and the team here loves to talk about the composability of open source projects. Composability being the idea that you can take these building blocks. You mentioned Legos. That's really important because people are combining, remixing, and reusing. It's kind of a buzzword, but I use it on the podcast. I'm going to stop being ashamed of it: combinatorial innovation. It's very primordial soup. You get all these ingredients and it leads to this combining and recombining and evolution and the Cambrian explosion. I'm just throwing a ton of buzzwords there. That's why the modularity matters.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: Can we talk for a minute about what it means from a project point of view when open source goes from big to these small collectives of people that may come together? What are the implications of that?
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: If you talk to free software activists from the 80s or the late 90s—I used to edit one of them, Richard Stallman, and he would call it "Libre"—people focused on the ideological implications of open source or free software. If you talk to them, you'll find that a lot of them are really concerned about the liberation, protection, and longevity of the code itself. "Freedom" is not referring to any freedom of developers. It's referring to freedom of the code.
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: But if you come down to a world where things are a lot more modularized, suddenly the focus shifts from the code to the people who are behind it. Every piece of code is much smaller, more trivial. There are very well-known developers, especially in the world of JavaScript, which encourages this style of development. There are very well-known developers who make hundreds or thousands of popular NPM modules, each their own separate project, but each one is very small. Suddenly it becomes more about the person behind it.
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: A useful parallel might be thinking about the impact of tweets versus blogs. A blog post is this lengthier thing, and a blog post kind of stands alone as a beautiful piece of literature. But if you're really into using Twitter, you might tweet 100 things in a day. One tweet might go viral, but you have so many more that come after that. It becomes about the person tweeting. It's not about, "Oh, he wrote that amazing tweet six years ago that I often revisit." That's not really what it's all about.
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: To summarize, the shift towards modularization also helps drive why we're seeing more interest in reputation-based and status-based economies. It wasn't a factor before. It was all about the code. Now it's all about the people.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: Michael Rogers and I actually wrote a piece about this when I was at Wired. It was called "The GitHub Revolution," in early 2013. The fundamental point is that GitHub inverted the model from project to person and that identity came in the picture. But to your point, when you have these modularized packages and individuals who are very tied to that, it does become about the person. Now on the social side, if reputation and the person is at the center, not just the code, what does that mean for how these groups organize and how they manage and collaborate?
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: There are absolutely different implications for how these different types of communities can and should think about organizing, growing, and maintaining over time. The currency I've settled on was focusing on a producer's attention as a limited resource. We all talk about the attention economy, but the attention economy tends to refer to a consumer's limited attention. We don't often talk about a producer's limited attention. A creator only has a finite amount of time. If we're thinking about creators and not these big distributed communities, the creator is on their own and their attention is not going to scale by themselves.
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: The first line I would draw is between clubs and federations, which are dealing with an abundance of attention because they can be high contributor growth. And then stadiums, which are dealing with a dearth of attention, because their contributor size is not growing significantly, but their number of users is growing.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: And just to emphasize, you're talking about the attention of the contributor and the creator.
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: Yes. The ones that are probably most interesting to talk about today are the difference between clubs, which have high contributor growth and low user growth, and stadiums, which have high user growth and low contributor growth. One of the things that previous online community literature focuses on a lot, and especially in open source, are governance processes. Governance is probably more useful and important to talk about in the context of larger contributor communities because these are coordination problems. You have multiple members with a stake in the community who are all coming in with their own interests. You're looking to figure out how we all best work together.
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: On the creator side, there's probably another version of these processes that need to be developed for stadiums. It's not really about governance in the same way because you usually only have one or a couple people at the helm. It's more about the relationship between that creator and their audience. How do I interface with my audience? How do I make them feel heard? How do I utilize people that might be willing to help or pitch in? There are different kinds of strategies they can think about around how, given my limited amount of attention, I make sure that stuff continues to get done.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: To pull on a couple of other threads, does this mean that these relationships even have to be persistent? I want to hear your thoughts on that because we talk about these very stable federations that have been around for decades. But one thing I find very appealing—and might be a bug to you, but I think it's a feature—is that some of these things seem like they don't have to be persistent and can be very ephemeral when you have that kind of small modular setup.
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: I absolutely think the relationship between creators and their audience becomes a lot more ephemeral, and we should almost be leading into that design.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: Yes, I really strongly believe this.
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: There have been terms that have existed in open source for a while, the idea of a "casual contributor" to distinguish between someone who's dropping in and making one contribution versus someone who's a more active or present community member.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: Didn't we even call them, in our last episode, "drive-by contributors"?
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: Yes. Drive-by contributors, casual contributors. These are the people that are not coming in with a pro-social attitude. One thing I did find in my research is that folks who come in as more active contributors making substantial contributions, a lot of them do come in displaying pro-social attitudes from the beginning.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: Ah, interesting.
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: They are coming in saying they're looking for a community that they want to be a part of and they want to help out. One behavior you might see that's different about an active contributor versus a casual one is someone coming in and answering someone else's question instead of opening an issue saying, "Fix my thing." Those are two very different kinds of behavior. One, you're trying to help someone else. One, you're asking for help. "I want to get something out of this. I want to get my contribution merged. I have a question that I need answered." They're coming in with some sort of personal interest.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: By the way, you also use the word "parasocial" in your book, which I had to look up because I didn't even know that was a thing.
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: Parasocial is a great way to describe what kinds of communities these stadiums essentially are. It basically means one-sided communities where one side of the audience has a deeper, more perceived intimate relationship with the creator than the creator does to them.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: That's very similar to podcasting.
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: It is very similar. If a creator were to treat every single fan they met or every single person in their audience as someone they're going to develop a deep and long-lasting relationship, that's just exhausting. It's completely impossible. But if they say, "Okay, we are going to just meet this one time. How can I make sure that this person feels fulfilled?" and I manage this without giving too much of myself. These interactions are more ephemeral, and we can design around that. Here are a bunch of self-serve resources, or I can encourage users to help each other instead of always turning to the creator for help. All these other supporting satellite communities can thrive and flourish on their own without needing involvement from the creator.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: What do you think of something like The Ringer, where you have someone like Bill Simmons? The analogy here is he's a hotshot coder, but really he's a creator. He did Grantland and then he went out on his own and did The Ringer. Within that, he built a constellation of brands underneath his parent brand. It's both bundling and also just constellation communities. Do you have thoughts on how that works and how that might play out in the open source world as well?
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: There is a version of that that happens in open source. You have this broader language ecosystem. I'll keep coming back to JavaScript as the best extreme to demonstrate this. We can drill even further into JavaScript, let's say the React ecosystem. Within React, there are a bunch of associated projects that a React developer might use. When we think about who is a contributor to that project, yes, you could look at who has actually made contributions to some specific sub-project, but you could also say, "Who's contributing to React more generally?"
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: Taking Webpack or something that is a sub-project that a React developer might expect to use, someone might have never contributed to Webpack before, but if they're well known as a developer in some other part of the React ecosystem, they already have a little bit of currency and a little bit of reputation if they were to try to come in and open a pull request or make a contribution.
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: I don't know exactly what the analogies are between that and subscription bundling. But one thing might be that when we think about what it would look like to have more subscription-type support for open source developers—GitHub Sponsors, Open Collective, there are examples of this already—we might think a little more about it not being just this one project that this developer works on, but they work on this ecosystem more generally. Similarly, the way a writer might have started with one type of newsletter and then joined forces with another one, and suddenly we're supporting this entire bundle of people working on a similar theme. You can imagine that happening with open source developers where they're no longer tied to one specific project. It's like, "I support your development work more generally."
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: One of the more obvious examples I could point to is Sindre Sorhus, who has created thousands of mostly NPM-related projects. He's sort of his own mysterious entity. It's not really about any one specific thing that he does. He's just a very generative person, and he is supported through sponsorships.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: I'm going to ask you a crazy question. This is a thing I've been very fascinated by for a long time. I tried pitching this at Wired by this idea of "digital suicide." Taylor Lorenz writes these beautiful pieces about Instagram and all these various communities online. I'm also fascinated by this phenomenon of all these teens creating multiple accounts and multiple identities on their Instagrams. Then they also abandon them, which is something I love—this idea of this kind of abandoned wasteland of digital identities and places. It feels like the real world to me that there are places that are ghost towns and places that have been lost in the sands of time for better and worse. Do you have thoughts on how that may or may not apply to open source? Not only do these things not have to be persistent, they can be ephemeral. Is it okay that they die or that they even have upfront a calculated kind of end point?
--:-- Sonal Choksi: Oh, this is where software gets really interesting and I think different from most other forms of creation. Because if someone creates an Instagram account that gets really, really popular and everyone's following it, and then eventually, suddenly this person goes dark and we never get another post from them, a lot of people will be sad about it. People might create spinoff accounts and tributes to that original account, whatever. But the world didn't actually break and shut down.
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: If a maintainer has a project that is wildly popular and they're just sort of over it and they disappear — and this does happen often — that code is still, if it's popular, being used by a bunch of other people. Code changes over time. It does need upkeep and maintenance. Intrinsic motivation helps a lot on the creation side of things in the very beginning. If something becomes really popular, then you start getting these more extrinsic rewards like reputational benefits or status or whatever. But a lot of that stuff is sort of front-loaded. So if you're talking about maintaining a software project into perpetuity, after a while, you're already known as the creator of that thing. There's not really any additional benefit, but you still need to keep maintaining. In fact, sometimes those maintenance costs get even higher over time.
--:-- That's why I think it helps make the case that we need to find other reasons to keep people wanting to maintain stuff, or make it easy for them to step down, because intrinsic motivation really only takes you so far. If something happens where they actually need changes or updates to be made to the project and the maintainer is nowhere in sight and nobody else has the ability to make commits or contribute, this actually can create real problems for software.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: You're basically describing software as more of a living, breathing organism in that context.
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: Yes. You either want to evolve it and keep it going, and generationally, it can evolve into something else and have offspring, et cetera. But it's a different thing than when you just have an abandoned site or an abandoned farm somewhere. This is why from the beginning, the ability to fork code — basically to copy the exact repository somewhere else — became a very important part of it early on. It says someone can always take a copy of this code and make their own version of it somewhere else.
--:-- Unfortunately, this comes back to this dependency issue today. Yes, in theory, you can fork a project. But in practice, there might be a lot of other software libraries, other pieces of software that are pointing to that specific project. So if you fork it, you now have to somehow convince all those projects to start pointing to your new project. It is this challenge in open source where sometimes a maintainer disappears and is nowhere to be found, but they still need to keep doing things to the code and to the project. Forking is not always an easy answer to that. It's still about telling everyone, "Hey, come over here, use this."
--:-- Sonal Choksi: That's actually why I think this concept of maintenance — which is maybe easier to see in software — really applies to every creator today.
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: Yes. Because a lot of people get this experience of doing one thing that might have gotten them a huge initial audience or whatever. It made you internet famous. But then you have to continue creating things. Otherwise people are going to stop paying attention to you. Much like writing code, it's not enough to just publish it once and be like, "I'm done, I'm never going to touch this thing again." If you are trying to build this reputation over time — and some people say, "I had one viral video on TikTok and that's it, I'm never doing anything else again" — but if you are trying to be a TikTok creator, you're going to have to start making more hits over time. Your reputation is itself this thing that requires maintenance in order to stay relevant.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: It is literally one of my favorite parts of your book because it reminds me of the theses that we've talked about at our firm too around the passion economy. Here, the artifact is code, but it can be any activity that's being coordinated, quite frankly, in your framework of your book, which is why I really believe this book is applicable to everybody. Open source is almost a misnomer because people think of beans and code, and it really means everything. It's any kind of creation and consumption, frankly. What you're really saying is a maintainer is not just a coder, it's a creator, and they're maintaining their content in this world or whatever they're creating, which I think is incredibly powerful.
--:-- What's really powerful about that is then you think about the related business models for that. When I think of the example of what subscription and SaaS did for the world of on-prem software — how people used to sell software, you had a suited person do this big multi-million dollar deal, install, never see them again — SaaS changed the game for everybody in companies because you had to consistently earn their dollars every month. But in a way that was a wonderfully sticky, stable relationship too. You were mutually dependent.
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: This is, I think, a giant red arrow pointing at why subscription models are going to only become more and more interesting in the very near future. They do take into account this need for ongoing development, their ongoing costs associated, and you have to earn that, as you said, over time. They're capable of capturing both your existing value — the value that you have accrued thus far — and also speaking towards the future value that you might create. Because when you subscribe to someone or someone's thing, you're saying, "I expect there is going to be more stuff being created in the future." This goes back to the phrase and something you said in your book, and that's sort of a theme for me: you can be transactional, but be in a very high sustained relationship because it's a repeated game, which is what subscription is.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: I think that's super fascinating. So what do you think the implications are then for people who change clubs, who go to a different stadium? How is this new passion economy and model evolved?
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: I think this comes back to the value of platforms and their distribution power. In the past, without having a platform — which is essentially just a stage for creators that is always going to exist, always there for the creator — if you wanted to go off and start something new somewhere else, it's really, really hard because how are you going to direct anyone to your new thing all the way over there? It's like building a house, but not building a road to the house. Platforms have this very important role that they play for creators: if you want to do something new, you have an audience that you're building on there that you can use to seed whatever your new idea is. Platforms make it so much easier than you could have in the past.
--:-- I work at Substack, and this is also why I and everyone that I work with believe really strongly in the power of an email list. An email list is something that you own. If you want to do something new with it, if you want to do something totally different, you have an audience that is built in and that you can take around with you wherever you want. But even if you don't have an email list, having a Twitter following or having an Instagram following gives you that seed money to do something else.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: Basically, you're saying that you have the distribution because your audience travels with you, and that's important currency because you don't have to start from scratch every time. That does go to your other point as well, that reputation is the key currency there. And that's where status — and you talk about this in your book and Eugene Wei's thesis about status as a service — comes in.
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: Eugene's thesis came out, thankfully, while I was writing my book. It was very helpful because I was like, "Oh great, now I have more vocabulary to explain the things that I mean that I'd been struggling with." I think actually this framing of status economies helps explain some of the shortcomings of GitHub thus far. There isn't a meaningful way to measure someone's status or just have a clear picture of what someone does on the platform or what kind of developer they are. You can look at any one specific project and you can see how popular it is, how many stars it has. But if you go to a developer's profile, it's not super clear what they're known for. You can technically follow a developer on GitHub, but it doesn't really mean anything, not at all the way that it does on Twitter or something like that.
--:-- I think if you talk to well-known developers or developers that have these larger followings, they'll probably tell you that they keep their audience on Twitter or somewhere else. GitHub serves a little bit more of this utility function. As Eugene said, if a platform fails to provide this sort of status benefit, then it basically becomes a utility. They will continue to develop the social and status aspects of their platform. But right now, it really is much more of a utility, I think.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: So you mentioned the power of a platform. And you've been using this analogy of cities and highways and connecting houses and connecting a small shop or a small village to a highway and what that does for people. What about the opposite? When people go off the grid, essentially, and go outside our purview into these sort of private, dark social places, whether it's WhatsApp groups or Telegram groups or private stadiums, private groups. You mentioned in the book — and I saw Yancey Strickler's tweet about this — he draws the analogy of the dark forest. The reason that we can't communicate with aliens is because the world is so vast. The only way people can protect themselves is by being in this dark forest where there are these vast spaces of separation. So you're not in a public commons. You're actually very isolated.
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: The only thing I would maybe add to the dark forest concept or metaphor is this idea of hostility. We are all actually surrounded. There are all these other people out there. If we're sitting here wondering where all the aliens are, they're there. But the theory is that we're all trying to stay out of each other's way and not be detected because destruction will be the result. It's not a good thing to meet anyone else as curious as we are. The dark forest comes from the idea of the Fermi Paradox, I believe. I'm a big fan of the Three-Body Problem Trilogy. They have the wall-facer, he's the one who figures this out. So I thought that was a super interesting analogy.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: Tell me a little bit more about your thoughts about the dark forest theory of the internet and how that applies here. What happens when people go off platform?
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: Yancey Strickler's comment about this — I think a lot of people are observing that we started with these really big social platforms that have grown to become really big. The Facebooks and the Twitters and the Instagrams and YouTubes of the world, these are the biggest stages possible. The analogy to what's happening on the very public web right now is that everyone's still talking, but we're kind of moving to these little corners without fear of being attacked or jumped on, somewhere where all context has otherwise collapsed.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: I'll say one more thing because I'm a big fan of the work of the sociologist Ronald Burt. He talked about this concept of structural holes where you can have clusters of activity and networks. I came across this because when I used to work at Xerox PARC, we used to talk a lot about the innovation that would happen when different fields would collide. It's because you have these containers, these clubs, these stadiums of people who have strong ties. But then these really interesting things can happen with the weak ties and the structural holes in the network. So if you map these out as a universe of clusters, imagine what's possible when you can actually bridge some of those structural holes across communities. Your book made me think about that, actually. I wonder if that's where the future is going. Is a bundle maybe that? Who knows what's happening there? We're only at the beginning of it.
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: I mentioned this quote in the book that Kevin Systrom said in an interview in 2018, I believe: "Social media is in this pre-Newtonian age where we know that it works, but we don't know how it works."
--:-- Sonal Choksi: I love that. I just think that's really perfect. It's perfect for the time we're in and it's perfect for why your book is so relevant. This is where I think the model of clubs versus stadiums becomes really useful. For a long time, everyone was really focused on the highly public aspects of the social web, but people are now starting to look at the semi-private web and these quieter spaces.
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: The biggest parallel trends that I'm seeing right now: one is seeing this formation of these creator-oriented communities that look like stadiums on the big public stage, say on Twitter or whatever. But then you see this other emergence of group chats. Group chats have always existed but have become a much bigger thing in recent years, partly because people are looking for relief from this highly public space. Those map really well to clubs where you aren't trying to add a lot of users to your messenger app. You're trying to just keep it to six of your closest friends. In most cases, you're actively suppressing user growth, but contributor growth is high where you're totally down to chat with your friends in that little group. So those map really well to the clubs that I identified here.
--:-- Stadiums apply to both these creator communities happening in very public platforms, but I think can also help us understand why things like podcasts and newsletters are having such a great moment in the sun right now. They're designed for that one-sided parasocial type of community. We're recording a podcast right now, it's just a conversation between me and you. Hopefully thousands of people will be listening to it later, but we're doing this in public — we're publishing our conversation — but we're not actively interacting with the audience that might be listening to us. Similarly with the newsletter, I can write this long-form post and share my thoughts in a higher context situation. I assume or hope that most of the people subscribing have some context for who I am. Then I can send it out and people can read it on their own time. It's not the same thing as when I tweet something out and literally anybody with an internet connection can see it and respond to it and pass it around and do whatever they want with it.
--:-- To summarize: the clubs are the projects, the spaces with high contributor growth and low user growth, like these private messaging groups. The stadiums are the projects with low contributor growth and high user growth, like these newsletters and podcasts.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: I really think, Nadia, one of the best things about your book is this framework of the federations, the clubs, the stadiums, the toys, because you de-homogenize this phrase "open source" and "community." And then it correspondingly gives people frameworks for what that means for how you build, support, and nurture that. So I'm now going to switch to asking you some practical questions about that.
--:-- Platforms are having a moment right now for better or worse. It's one of the reasons that we also are very excited about crypto and talking about communities. I want to talk about the tragedy of the commons and the work of Eleanor Ostrom, who is definitely having a moment right now. You and a lot of other people I know have been citing her work. One of our former partners, Jesse Walden, wrote a post about cooperatives as an analogy for crypto networks, and he cited some of the conditions that she cites in governing the commons. You yourself summarize the conditions. Can you A, tell me what those are? B, tell me why you think this is important? And C, help me connect the dots for how that matters practically?
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: Sure. Eleanor Ostrom was a researcher who became well-known for her work trying to understand why the tragedy of the commons occurs and how we might avoid it or move around it. The tragedy of the commons is that if everyone has access to a shared resource — you can imagine a fishery or a forest — anyone can cut down wood in the forest. But if everyone does that and just does what they want for themselves, then eventually that forest is going to be depleted unless it is managed in some shape or form. The tragedy of the commons is this concept from ages ago that is one possible outcome of the commons. But it's almost like when people talk about commons, they always talk about tragedy of the commons as though you can't have a non-tragedy of the commons.
--:-- Eleanor Ostrom is basically looking at what are situations where commons are being sustainably self-managed. She did decades of research looking at fisheries and forests and different examples of commons, documenting what she found and summarizing them into principles for how you can manage a shared resource without everyone just taking for themselves. I talk about her conditions in the book a bit. The ones that I'll point to that are most relevant for this conversation are this idea that in order to have a well-managed commons, you do need to draw boundaries around membership. It needs to be clear who is allowed to appropriate from the commons and who isn't. With that, there are all these implications of what it means to be a member of the commons.
--:-- A couple of things that I'll highlight: one, this idea that you have high context for your interactions with other people that are also members.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: That creates trust. That's what creates trust. It's like in a company — the best advice you can give to any team or any fast-growing group is the more shared context, the more trust you have because you can do more shortcuts together in your work.
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: That's right. High context, high trust is a really important implication of having these clear membership boundaries. The other thing I'll point to is the idea of having a low discount rate, which is just saying that if you're a member of this community, you expect to be around for a while.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: Sorry, what do you mean by low discount rate?
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: Low discount rate is just this idea that if you're invested in the community for a long period of time, you're not planning on hopping in, saying something rude — if this applies to online communities — and then just hopping out and disappearing. You're like, "I'm stuck here. I need to actually learn how to work with everybody else."
--:-- Sonal Choksi: It's actually kind of like skin in the game.
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: Yes. In order for a commons to function in this healthy way, you need to have these underlying conditions of high context, of having skin in the game, of having clearly defined membership, among a bunch of other things that I won't get into here. Her work is finding renewed appeal right now, especially because people are trying to answer these questions in open source and in online communities elsewhere: how can communities self-manage and not implode over time?
--:-- There is so much that is relevant about her work to today. I think it mostly applies to the concept of clubs — clubs basically being this commons where everyone has a stake in what they're creating. If we think about a stadium, a creator's community that is on a very public social platform, the whole concept of the commons kind of breaks down. If I'm tweeting in public, anybody can read what I'm saying. Until recently, as Twitter is now making it possible for people to limit comments on their tweets, for the most part, anybody can just comment on my tweet and jump in. Understanding both what her theory of the commons was and why it doesn't really apply to today can help answer some of these questions: Is it okay to have comment threads that are entirely open to everyone? What are the problems that might arise from that? What can we do to actually limit interactions from outsiders so that the people that are most involved and have most skin in the game can actually get stuff done?
--:-- It's a difficult thing to talk about because it can be taken as gatekeeping or trying to keep other people from participating. It's a touchy subject. I can't say that we should just close off the boundaries entirely. I think this gets to the idea that you can have things that are public but not participatory. It's okay to make software that anyone can use. That doesn't mean that everybody who uses your software can also participate in its production. It's really just about finding a middle ground there.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: You have so many great analogies in your book that sometimes this is more like directing air traffic, given the flood of abundance we have on our internet today. On that front, I'm going to ask you just a couple of quick questions on the practical front. I'm going to do this lightning round style.
--:-- What is one key piece of advice you might have for community managers?
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: For community managers, first thought is just know what kind of community you're in charge of. That's where I think it's helpful to have a set of different models in your mind. Are you actively trying to bring in lots more contributors? It's okay if you're not. Some communities do better on contributor retention and less so on contributor growth, and that's totally fine. Or is it the kind of thing where there is a lot of work that needs to be done and you think you stand a chance of recruiting more people? Then go recruit more people. It's fine to have a community that isn't super high growth but is stable. It's fine to have a community that is extremely high growth, where you're trying to bring in lots of different kinds of members and make it this really bustling federation-style community. It's fine to have just one person standing up in front of a crowd. That is a community in its own form. It just requires different sorts of strategies to figure out how to manage it.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: You're basically saying know the difference of whether you have a club or a stadium. And by the way, you quoted that person talking about the Newtonian phase. Who knows? There might be times when you can have both in one place. So that can change.
--:-- And then how about advice for platforms?
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: For platforms, I would say take your creators seriously and the responsibility and the relationship that you have to them. What I mean by that is that platforms are really the only place to create these closed status economies that enable creators to continue doing their work for however long they want and to open up all these amazing opportunities for creators. Sometimes that doesn't directly happen on your platform — maybe it's not that they can raise money directly on your platform — but it is important to make their status legible to others so that they can take that clout and that reputation and actually shop it around to turn it into other opportunities.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: I might even add that crypto is great for that because that's where you can actually port some of your currency, your reputation currency and provenance, in a way that like in blockchains.
--:-- And then finally, advice for leadership and or communication tools. We've talked a lot about collaboration and coordination, but people don't often talk about the communication part of things. This is particularly heightened in our remote world. So any advice you have on the communication tool side and then anything for the leadership side?
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: I'll start with the leadership side. On the leadership side, I think it's again about knowing your community and not being afraid to be decisive. A lot of communities that I've looked at have suffered in one direction or the other of either being overly deferential to their community and trying to treat it like this pure democracy when really the community's size or shape is so unwieldy that that's not really possible. So it is okay to say, "These are the decisions that are being made, and we don't have to bring this to a vote every time we want to decide what we want to do." On the flip side, depending on what type of community you are overseeing, there are ways to bring those active voices and contributors into leadership and encourage more people to participate. But again, it depends on whether you're on the high growth side or low growth side.
--:-- On the communication tool side, I think this idea that separating the ideas of public and participatory is just going to lead to a lot of really interesting things happening in the near future. Just getting playful with the idea that a community does not mean that everyone is participating at equal volume and shouting at each other, because we've seen with every social platform that that gets pretty hard at scale. As we're creating new things today, it's fun to think about the opportunity we have in front of us to actually design from scratch and think, "How would we have these sort of scaled social interactions?" Disambiguating the idea of public and participatory can just lead to really fruitful new ways of communicating.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Questlove from his book *Creative Quest*. He basically writes that when you make work, you are the creator, but also the eventual audience, which I think is such a powerful idea. There's so many different ways to interpret that. What I love about your book is that it's not a grand theory of everything. It ties together lots of different themes in a really meaningful way, but you can also tease them apart regardless of your vantage point, whether you're a creator, open source, business, however you might define a company or any form of coordination and collaboration.
--:-- I also appreciate, given that you were kind of newer to the community compared to the first early generations, that you don't bring this sort of chip of nostalgia. You come at it from a very first principles approach and just bring all your insights together. So I just want to thank you for *Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software*. I'm going to add my own personal subhead, which is "and many many other kinds of orgs," so don't just not read it if you don't think it's about you, because open source is everyone. Thank you for joining the a16z podcast.
--:-- Nadia Asparohov: Thank you. It was a pleasure to be here.
